


In the Garden of Good and Evil

by Leanansidhe363



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Case Fic, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, F/M, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-20 06:01:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 46,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5994117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leanansidhe363/pseuds/Leanansidhe363
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sherlock Holmes loves, he loves obsessively.<br/>He loves the Work. He loves his city. He loves John Watson. </p><p>After fifteen years together, Sherlock wakes up in a hospital with a year and a half missing from his memory the life he fought for in pieces around him. His marriage has fallen apart and John has moved on with someone else. John, desperate to put his life and his broken heart back together, struggles to withstand Sherlock's renewed devotion as well as his persistent possessive jealousy. </p><p>A new drug on the streets of London is turning its users briefly to geniuses before driving them insane. A figure from Sherlock's past is playing a deadly new game with Sherlock and it will be John who suffers for the Consulting Detective's failure.<br/>The fractured couple might learn too late that love is the most lethal addiction of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This it the reboot of What Will Survive Us Is Love. Updates will be every other week on no particular day :) Keep a weather eye out. 
> 
> Huge thanks to all the people who have supported this project, and I hope this will be as satisfying for you as it is for me
> 
> If you're new to the story, I hope you love reading it as much as I love writing it.

_“Don’t be melodramatic, John. It’s not your area.”_

_Sherlock Holmes was a man who made a point of not indulging in anger. Anger was a tumultuous emotion which clouded the mind and countermanded rationality. It made the facts hard to focus on, it soaked the brain in chemicals not conducive to dispassionate deduction._

_Sherlock preferred to cut, not with emotional digs, but with the brutal blade of cold fact._

_“Stop pretending you’re a machine, Sherlock.”_

_John Watson, alternatively, was a man who wore his heart on his preverbal sleeve and his feelings on every line of his handsome, weathered face. His anger was a volcano to Sherlock’s iceberg. He shone with righteous indignation, giddy rage and incandescent fury. He impaled himself on Sherlock’s thorns over and over again and never failed to be surprised that it hurt._

_Loving Sherlock was a fool’s errand and John was nothing if not an obstinate fool._

_“I love you.”_

_John was never sparing with that phrase. Sherlock expected those words to come with diminishing returns – that it meant less the more it was used. That it would become pedestrian and dull. But John said them the same way every time; as if it were the first time he were telling Sherlock. As if he were just realizing it then; that he loved the man. There was wonder and joy and not a small amount of surprise in John’s voice as his tongue caressed the words and blew them like a kiss across Sherlock’s entire being._

_“I need you.”_

_Sherlock had contemplated what it meant to_ need _someone. Was John required for oxygen? No, his lungs worked independently of John Watson. Did he require John to eat and sleep? Debatably, yes, but literally not. Did he require John Watson to pump blood through his veins? No, John was not his heart._

_And yet…_

_John Watson was instrumental is Sherlock’s laughter, his pleasure, his sanity, and his sobriety. He was the irreplaceable constant in Sherlock’s happiness. He may not pump Sherlock’s blood, and Sherlock rarely indulged in hyperbole, but John_ was _his heart._

_He needed John. And he’d meant it._

_“You have to stop doing this to yourself.”_

_Serlock’s heart was a wild, painful staccato in his chest, his brain was on fire, his skin itched horribly all the way up his arm where each of the six double-strength nicotine patches spotted his skin like an animal’s markings._

_He felt dizzy, nearly sick, but his focus was razor sharp and wire-tuned to everything around him. He was and thought and deduced and conjectured with crystalline clarity even as the transport begged for mercy._

_A plea that was in whole-hearted agreement with the man he loved._

_“Cocaine would be more effective,”_

_He said it conversationally, but the darkest, cruelest part of him alighted at the way the faint color in John’s English skin disappeared and his eyes took on that wounded-angry expression that warned of danger to anyone with the sense to look._

_Sherlock didn’t mean to feel the desire for his preferred seven percent solution so vividly but the near overdose of nicotine was giving every nerve in his body a kind of live-wire amplification and Sherlock could feel the sting of the needle, the half-arousal of the ritual and routine of checking and mixing the dosage, the way his heart lurched in his chest as the skin split under the pinprick pressure of the needle’s point before his body was forgotten and his mind was lifted to the nirvana of a flawless machine._

_It was better than most things, not as good as others. The high of the drugs never compared to John’s warm, supernova-bright heart, his awed smiles or the indulgent quirk of his brow. Having the drugs inside him didn’t come close to John’s body, his dexterous doctor’s fingers and hard soldier’s muscle._

_But John never understood. Not when Lestrade set up a fake drugs bust on that first case or years later when Sherlock covered what he believed to be the salient points of his substance abusing history to his friend-lover-doctor-blogger-heart in the dark and quiet confessional of their shared bed on one of the first nights they’d shared it._

_“You don’t get to ever fucking say that to me.”_

_John had gone a bit blue-grey, his cobalt-blue eyes bleak and furious as an iron-strong grip lashed out and ripped the patches off his husband’s arm (the reddened, irritated skin beneath cheered relief as cool air kissed his abused epidermal). He was quick and efficient and he all but threw Sherlock’s appendage down when he was finished before he snatched up the box of remaining patches, turned, and stomped up the stairs to what used to be his bedroom but had become a storage room with a bed._

_John only slept there when Sherlock had truly hurt him._

_“I’m sorry.”_

_Neither men said it often, nor were they expected to. They brandished emotional and intellectual weapons, took aim, bled each other dry, cut each other to pieces and, like Prometheus, they were made whole the next day._

_But sometimes, when Sherlock cut too deep and the bleeding didn’t seem to stop, and John’s brilliant eyes went grey and he walked with a slight drag of his right leg, Sherlock had to suture the wound with apology._

_Sometimes, when Sherlock went cold and the walls of his mind palace were webbed with icy tendrils and his spine went rigid and his eyes went cruel, John had to open his fragile supernova heart and melt the frost with gentle supplications of forgiveness._

_“I hate you.”_

_It was a triangle of words that John never expected to hear from the mad detective who shared his life. It wasn’t unlike what angry couples said to each other all the time in the real world that existed outside of the Twilight Zone of 221B Baker Street. Coming from Sherlock, it was the hardest, cruelest thing one person could say to another. Because Sherlock didn’t indulge in hyperbole. He didn’t let anger cloud his judgement and make him say things he didn’t mean._

_“No you don’t,” John said and he couldn’t help the way his lips formed the words like sharpening a knife, “Hatred requires a depth of emotion you don’t possess.”_

_“We can’t go on like this.”_

_Part plea. Part demand. Hope and despair. An amalgamation of feelings Sherlock had no idea what to do with. John was willing to pay any price to keep them together. To save what they’d built over fifteen years of gun fights and rooftop chases and bad television and sex and screaming matches and quiet laughter in the half-dark of their bedroom as they lay in bed and existed in unlikely symbiosis._

_“I am, without contest, your best friend.”_

_John said it as the fact that it was. If he’d replaced the word ‘best’ with ‘only,’ it still would have been true. He enunciated his words the same as if he shouted them; like if he was either very clear or very loud, they might get through to the mad bastard at whom the words were aimed._

_“And you are undoubtedly mine,” his voice scraped raw over the emotions that caught in his throat; aching and hollow with despair. How could this be happening? How in god’s almighty name was everything falling so very apart?_

_“I... I don’t want to lose that.” He placed his hand over one of Sherlock’s; a hand he knew so well he could trace the whorls and curves of his lover’s fingerprints in his sleep._

_Long fingers wrapped around his, squeezed like John was a lifeline._

_And then withdrew._

_“I don’t want you to touch me anymore.”_

_It was dispassionate. It was cold, clinical, and almost an apology. Sherlock had never meant to come to this, but there they were. Sherlock looked past John, kept his voice even and reasonable, and didn’t flinch._

_Not even when the doctor’s fist came down on the table, caught a beaker, and sliced open skin as the glass shattered under the impact. He forced himself to look into John’s eyes – red rimmed and hollow with heartbreak – as the doctor searched his husband’s face for some clue, some tiny flicker of warmth and love, which indicated that this wasn’t really happening._

_“Yeah,” John replied, his voice rasping over leaden despair the small man could not give voice to, his posture military-rigid and the light which had existed in John Watson’s cobalt blue eyes since the first time they’d met was finally extinguished._

_“Do you…”_

_John’s throat constricted over the words. They clawed his tongue and choked him with the sheer desire to not be said. He felt a chasm in his chest, an ache too deep for words. He’d felt greif before. The hollow nothingness of his bedsit when he’d gotten back from the war. The sluggish understanding that his life as an Army doctor – the only thing he’d ever wanted to do – was over from the moment he woke up in hospital with a bullet wound in his shoulder and eight months of intensive physical therapy to regain most of the use of his right arm._

_“Sherlock, I can’t…”_

_His old army kit was at his feet, most of his clothes tucked inside along with a few things he didn’t want to give Sherlock the opportunity to destroy or bin should that wall come down long enough for the detective to have some kind of_ emotional _reaction to what John was doing._

_And god, John’s heart was breaking under the weight of it. He wasn’t sure he would be able to make it out the door before he puked, before his dodgy leg went out from under him. His left hand was trembling but his spine was straight. He’d do this. If it was what Sherlock wanted, what he needed… John could do this._

_“Stop boring me and go.”_

_Sherlock was not a man who indulged prayer. To say he was an atheist would be to give the matter more consideration than he himself had ever done. He never spared John a glance. He never opened his eyes as John bent stiffly and hauled his duffel from the floor, and his key clanked into the dish by the door on his way out. How his tread came down too heavy on his right leg because he_ was _limping. His breath was turning erratic, also. He was not going to cry. Not in front of Sherlock._

 

_Sherlock twisted his gold wedding band around his finger, felt the accusing scrape of metal on his skin and the barely perceptible judder of disrupted nerves as they slid across the inscription on the polished inside of the ring._

_He slid the token off and held it between thumb and forefinger, letting the letters catch on the low light from the windows as the sun went down on London._

**For You. For Us. Forever.**

_John had written it in gold and wrapped it around Sherlock’s finger. Stamped it into every neuron and the tender place he wasn’t quite convinced was his soul._

Forever _. John had promised forever. Sherlock had promised to try._

 _Sherlock had to believe it. He had to trust in the power of_ them _. Together (against the rest of the world)._

_Or neither would survive this game._


	2. Chapter One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock wakes in hospital and John isn't speaking the same language as he is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is about a week later than I intended it to be, and for that I apologize. Thanks for all your wonderful feedback so far, you make this project a labor of love <3

            Beep.

            _It’s not the fall that kills you…_

Beep.

            _Keep your eyes fixed on me…_

Beep.

            _It’s never the fall…_

            Beep.

            _Just one more miracle…_

Beep.

            _It’s the landing._

Sherlock Holmes woke to the syncopated beat of a heart machine in the near-dark of a room that smelled of sterilizer and iodine. Hospital, then.

            He tried to sit up and regretted it instantly. His back and neck screamed their dissent, his ribs ached sharply at even the most shallow inhale, and his left arm was itchy and constricted within the limitations of a cast.

            What… what happened?

            He closed his eyes for longer than a standard blink and tested his body’s boundaries. A shallow intake of breath that stuttered to a gasp as agony shot through his ribs under the tight binding around his chest.

            _Broken, then. Two –_ cringe – _no, three. Damn._

He flexed his fingers and toes, his left hand ached, but it was nothing to his ribs. There was barely any swelling or discoloration to the halves of his fingers sticking out from the end of the cast.

            _Fracture. Hairline, probably. A snapped bone would be significantly more painful. Speculation without official diagnosis. Hateful._

His back and shoulders felt positively black with bruises; swollen and tender through his abused skin. His skull felt pressurized and too small for his brain.

            _Cranial swelling. Frontal lobe._

_Primary theory: Car accident?_

            Sherlock glanced down at his naked right arm and the plain cotton hospital gown he wore that disappeared half way down his chest underneath the itchy and insubstantial material of the hospital blanket.

            _I’m cold._

Sherlock grit his teeth, and forced himself to concentrate. It was hard, he was disoriented and thirsty and -

            _I’m cold._

            He fisted his hands in the sheet as sudden chills wracked his aching body.

            _S-secondary theory: Some kind of fall?_

The hand not hindered by a cast clenched in the sheets as his teeth chattered and gooseflesh rippled over the exposed skin of his arms. He tried to take a breath and groaned as the cruel ache in his torso flared to violent life.

            _John._

_Where’s John?_

_BEEEEEEEP_

            The heart monitor let out a warbling scream as Sherlock pulled the stethoscope end from the skin over his heart. He made work of the IV in his uninjured arm with clumsy, constricted fingers before mapping out the least painful way of escaping the claustrophobic confines of his gurney.

            He had to find John and make sure that he was alright. John would not have left him alone in hospital unless he was in as bad a shape as the detective himself. If John was injured, Sherlock had to know, and he had to fix it. Sherlock’s memory of the events leading up to his waking were nothing but blank white space in what should have been the unmarred halls of his memory, but for the time being, that was unimportant. Tedius. John Watson could be hurt, and Sherlock couldn’t sit idle.

            He’d made it three valiant and agonized steps before a nurse – _approximately thirty two, three cats, married, cheap perfume insufficient to hide the more masculine scent of a cologne that did not belong to her husband. Obvious –_ bustled into the room, banging open the door and all but squawking her unimportant disapproval of Sherlock’s attempted escape.

            He ignored her completely in favor of the man behind her. John Watson – _sallow-skinned, worn down with worry and anger, unshaven one… no, two days, rumpled clothing unchanged approximately forty-three hours_ – set the cup of tepid hospital café tea down on the nearest flat surface and caught Sherlock just as the detective’s legs went out under him.

            “What the hell, Sherlock?” There was more bite in his tone than Sherlock thought was entirely warranted, but his small hands were gentle as he put a hand on his husband’s hip and helped him back to the bed.

            “You’re alright,” Sherlock murmured, “You weren’t here, I was afraid you were injured worse than me.”

            “Why would you possibly think that?” John’s tone was still slightly arctic and it stifled the brief flash of warmth that had flared to life inside of Sherlock at seeing his doctor unharmed. He was cold; again or still, he didn’t differentiate.

            Shivers wracked his body, indifferent to the inadequate hospital sheet that was thrown over him by the nurse he’d dismissed the moment she’d walked through the door.

            “It’s cold,” Sherlock felt the IV reenter his arm and he hated it. Hated all of it. It was pouring CO2 into his veins. How could they both stand there as if the room were not an ice prison?

            “It’s eighteen degrees, Mr. Holmes.” The nurse didn’t bother to look at him as she spoke, directing her inane comment to the monitors above his head.

            “Unimportant,” he snapped, never taking his eyes from his husband’s weathered, handsome face.

            “I’ll see if I can’t find another blanket for you somewhere,” John seemed to be looking for an excuse to leave and Sherlock reacted viscerally before he could consider better.

            “No!” He sat up as far and as quickly as he could before the creaking, searing ache in his chest and back nearly tore a scream from him. His vision swam and cold sweat burst along his brow and lip as agony washed through him from hips to shoulders. He’d all but forgotten the bruising along his back and the pain was nauseating.

            “Shit,” John was finally really there in a way he had not been in the moments since he’d entered the room, his hand immediately going to Sherlock’s face. He brushed absent tears from his lover’s zygomatic arches and gently checked the detective’s pupils, muttering gentle placation and reassurance as he did. “Shh, love. Breathe shallow, slow, I’ve got you. Sherlock, open your eyes, love. C’mon, Sherlock. Okay.”

            “My…” Sherlock’s voice was a rough scrape along his throat, “My ring. Do you have it?” He couldn’t help but push his head against his doctor’s hand just a bit. John sometimes accused him of being more akin to a spoiled cat than a brilliant human, and Sherlock could find no flaw in his reasoning. Sherlock was absolutely feline in practically every way.

            “Ring?” the nurse, the stupid, insipid, pointless and intruding woman who shattered the intimacy of their moment with her grating, idiotic input, called John’s attention to the present and he retracted from Sherlock emotionally as much as physically.

            “Yes, idiot,” Sherlock snapped, “ring. Wedding ring. Small? Symbolic? Not physically dissimilar to the one you yourself remove every time you engage in extramarital affairs with the head of radiology.”

            “Sherlock,” John sighed as the insufferable woman stomped out of the room.

            “What? She was annoying.”

            John reached into his pocket and produced a gold band between his fingers. It matched the one on his own left hand and John examines it with a bit of wonder, “You were wearing this?”

            “John, when have you ever known me to take it off?” Indeed, several experiments had been compromised by Sherlock forgetting or refusing to remove his wedding ring and it wasn’t until he lost it in a cadaver’s abdomen that John had presented Sherlock with the chain that used to house his dog tags with the alternative of keeping the ring around Sherlock’s neck when it couldn’t be on his finger.

            After he’d lectured Sherlock about lab safety, hygiene and rubber gloves for about a week.

            “John,” Sherlock held out his hand for the band and caught his husband’s fingers before the doctor had a chance to pull away, “You’re angry with me.”

            In the muffled quiet of the room, the Sherlock’s heart monitor seemed to shriek in short bursts that interrupted the stale, cool air between them, underscoring the things that John seemed reticent to voice. His worn doctor face was crumpled and sad, the bags under his eyes were purpled bruises, and the stubble along his jaw was scratchy-rough and haggard. He looked devastated and furious and so, so _tired_.

 

            _Beep_

            He’s angry.

            _Beep_

            He’s worried.

            _Beep_

            He’s tired.

            _Beep_

            He’s frightened.

 

            Sherlock couldn’t slip the ring under the unforgiving mold of his cast and instead slipped it on the finger of the opposite hand. It felt foreign and wrong against his skin, but less so than when it had been missing altogether. He watched the lines of John’s face shift ad despised the bleak grey emptiness in his deep blue eyes.

            Sherlock’s amplified heartbeat pounded out the rhythm of his clumsy sentiment.

 

            _Beep beep_

            You’re scaring me.

            _Beep beep_

I’m confused.

            _Beep beep_

            I love you.

            _Beep beep_

You’re hurting me.

           

            “Of course…” John’s ragged voice scraped like broken over his lips, “Of course I’m angry with you, Sherlock. Jesus Christ, did you think I wouldn’t be? Just because you…” He put a shaking hand over face, “Look, you’re not in any shape for this and neither am I. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

            “I’m not.”

            “I know.”

            “It wasn’t that bad,” Sherlock felt the flawless cogs of his memory stutter over the things that might have most recently have made John so angry with him. He hadn’t seen his husband so mad singe right after Sherlock had returned from the dead. That was nearly ten years ago.

            “How on _Earth_ was it not this bad, Sherlock?” John’s casual coldness sparked an answering ire in the detective and Sherlock huffed a sigh that he refused to admit was just a shade petulant.

            “They were shoes, John. Shoes and a washing machine. I didn’t burn down Parliament for god’s sake!”

             John’s face crumpled in a familiar look of complete incomprehension, “ _What_?”

            “I can only assume you’re still cross about that, though I cannot fathom why.” Sherlock injected as much distain as he was physically capable at that moment.

            “This has nothing to do…with…” John stopped, all expression slipping from his face as he looked into Sherlock’s eyes, “The shoes. The wash. You… You… Sherlock, when was that?”

            “What a stupid – ”

            “Sherlock, humor me.”

            Sherlock quickly did some mental adjustments, taking into consideration the two days he’d been in hospital (two days, judging by the state of John). “About a week ago? I assume, because nothing interesting happened in between, except for whatever got me here. What did get me here?”

            John didn’t answer, John didn’t do anything for several stunned seconds before he abruptly leaned down and sealed his mouth over Sherlock’s, kissing him as if he’d not done so in ages.

            Sherlock felt it resonate to the core of him, beating back the cold and awakening a strange longing in him for John’s touch as if he’d been too long starved for it. As if he’d not felt those lips on him in months.

            “John,” he breathed, wrapping his fingers around the nape of his lover’s neck and holding him in place, licking into his soft mouth and reveling in the simple intimacy of a kiss. Breathing didn’t hurt in that moment, it didn’t hurt because it didn’t happen. Breathing, when the alternative was kissing John, had always been boring.

            “Sher…” John breathed into his mouth, straining slightly against Sherlock’s trapping, holding hand. “Sherlock, don’t. I’m sorry… I can’t…” Sherlock wouldn’t, couldn’t, loose his hold on his lover’s well-mapped skin.

            He felt parched for John, lost in an ache under his bandaged chest that had nothing to do with physical injuries. “I’m sorry, John.” He couldn’t quite grasp what he was apologizing for, but it felt like the three most important words he’d ever uttered. Surely a few wet trainers and a stroppy Mrs. Hudson couldn’t warrant _this_.

            “Stay.” Sherlock relinquished his hold on John’s nape, looking up into his lover’s eyes as they stared back into him. They were soft again, the familiar soft of nearly fifteen years of living out of each other’s pockets. The softness of John Watson’s unconditional love, and it was almost enough to wash away the guilty, anguished shroud which stifled the ever-present light in his lovely, expressive eyes.

            “I’m sorry,” the doctor breathed, “I shouldn’t have done that, I’m sorry.”

            “Shouldn’t have kissed your husband of ten years in a hospital?” Sherlock tried to deduce what was happening in that funny little brain of his, but the sharp, throbbing pain in his own overstuffed cranium stopped him short. The swelling in his brain – _concussion, dull_ – effectively stomped away any aspirations of higher deductions than what was basic and obvious to any person who might use the meat between their ears to observe instead of simply see.

            “You’re… not well, Sherlock. I shouldn’t have…” John sighed and put a warm, work-roughened hand oh-so-gently on Sherlock’s aching neck, his fingers a balm for the real and imagined ailments. Sherlock never felt cold when John looked at him like he was precious.

            “Get some sleep, love.” The endearment seemed to slip out without the doctor’s meaning it too as he brushed a stray curl, stubbornly black as John’s blonde hair succumbed to gray, off his brow.

            “Will you be here?” Sherlock should have hated the childish way it came out, small and sleepy like he’d sounded when he was eight years old and sick with pneumonia and asking his big brother the same question as the older boy sat beside his bed and looked very much like he might make the doctors very sorry indeed if they did not fix his baby brother _now._

            His brother had given him a perfectly practiced look of (affectionate, almost-playing) superiority and said, “Where else would I be?”

            John only squeezed his eyes closed as if Sherlock had punched him in the stomach and nodded his head. “I’ll… yes. Yes.”

            Sherlock watched him pull the visitor’s chair from its place in the far corner of the room up against the bad on Sherlock’s right side, reaching out and wrapping his fingers around the detective’s uninjured hand as he rested his forehead on the blanket by Sherlock’s thigh. Every inch of space between their bodies was a travesty, every second of tense silence a frustratingly unsolved crime.

            “I love you,” Sherlock mumbled as the sedatives and painkillers that the horrible, idiot nurse woman had administered washed over him in a wave of lethargy and pulled him deep, deep into their depths.

            “I love you, Sherlock.” John’s voice was quiet-muffled-terriblyterribly _pained_ but Sherlock couldn’t fight his way back to the surface for John and the fight against the pull of sleep, the fight back to John’s side, was lost in a haze of numbness.

            Sherlock’s last, distant, conscious thought was that he thought he’d heard John whisper,

            _I’m sorry._


	3. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this has been inexcusably long in coming. If you never forgive me, I'll understand. Hopefully though, this long chapter goes a small way toward your forgiveness.

“John - ”

“No.”

Sherlock wanted to huff dramatically, but a painful twitch in his abdomen reminded him that theatrics were off the table for as many weeks as it took to heal.

“John, I can’t - ”

“Sherlock, you can. You don’t have a choice.”

“So, I’m to remain incarcerated here by the will of my fascist brother for the rest of my life.”

 John, damn him, had actually laughed at that. “Five weeks, drama queen. You’ll live.”

Sherlock had woken in the hospital three days ago and John was never too far away. John tended to his needs, wrapped his ribs and kept his cuts clean and looked worried when Sherlock could see him and devastatingly sad when he thought Sherlock wasn’t looking. His touches never lingered, were never more than medicinal. Sherlock hated it.

He hated _her_.

Sherlock had woken on the second day of his hospital stay with a splitting headache and a feeling of vertigo. He lay in bed with his eyes squeezed shut against the low light of the lamp on the opposite side of the room and tried to breathe normally and quash the nauseas roiling in his flat stomach.

There were voices on the other side of his closed door. Tense, terse voices of a man and woman quarreling and trying to be quiet about it.

They failed.

“There is no good reason for this!” The woman, mid-thirties, Welsh-born but living in London. Standard, middle-class primary school and standard, middle-class college education. Probably worked a standard, middle-class job. Nurse, librarian, teacher.

Dull.

“Mary it’s not –” Well, that was John. Soft tenor, sand-roughened and edged with cobalt-blue steel (like his eyes, like his gun) as he viciously denied whatever _Mary_ (who the hell is Mary?... Mary… Sherlock latched onto a slightly-blurry mental image of a boring blonde secretary in John’s medical office. Sensible two-point-five inch heels in boots more expensive than her salary generally afforded which she’d gotten in good second-hand condition because they matched her… Sherlock had gotten unbearably bored deducing her by that point and the only salient detail about her had been that she’d fancied John when she’d started at his GP. John had let her down much easier than Sherlock would have liked and the two had maintained far more amicable office relationship than Sherlock would have preferred.

 _Morstan_ , his brain finally supplied, _Mary Morstan._ )

“Isn’t it?” _Mary Morstan_ asked, voice small and exasperated and irritating. Her soft, rounded consonants and slightly husky vowels grated on him in a way he couldn’t quite place. He felt… jealous? It wasn’t as if it was a foreign concept to Sherlock, he was jealous of practically any woman John gave more than five seconds of attention to and he wasn’t blind to how much it aggravated John.

But this was different. This jealousy wasn’t possessive, it was bereft. It hurt and confused him and he wanted her away with the ferocity of true hatred. He wanted John beside him and _Mary Morstan_ a memory that could be scrubbed away with the brush of John’s lips on his.

If only John would kiss him, if only his husband weren’t holding off like Sherlock would shatter if the doctor smiled too hard in his general direction.

“Maybe I should…” She drifted off, and the scuff of shoes on linoleum said she was making an exit. _Yes,_ Sherlock hissed in the privacy of his own head, _go away. Back off. He’s mine._

“No!” John, Sherlock decided, was doing this on purpose. Just to drive Sherlock mad. His earnest plea, his honest blue eyes, the way his voice hitched in just that way that left Sherlock powerless, even by proxy, to deny the man anything.

 _Mary Morstan_ stood no chance.

 “Please,” John sighed, “just… stay.”

“John, He’s - !”

“Mary, he doesn’t remember!” John snapped, the edge of his lovely voice tinged with the absolute authority of a man who never stopped being accustomed to barking an order and having it followed.

(He wore his lumpy jumpers, he smiled easily, and he shared a pint with Lestrade and wrote his widely-adored blog and let the whole world see him as the sidekick. See him as the man who followed Sherlock Holmes. They never suspected that he was a leader, a warrior, a god of his own arena and that Sherlock would follow him straight into the godless fires of hell and kiss the ashes from his skin.

John was a doctor with a quick smile and a seemingly endless supply of baggy blue jeans and scuffed shoes. It was the cleverest disguise Sherlock had ever seen; you wouldn’t realize you were looking at a lethal, experienced killer until you were already dead and John Watson was giggling inappropriately over your cooling corpse.

Sherlock _loved_ him.)

If Sherlock could only remember what had landed him in hospital – a case gone wrong or a miscalculation with an experiment, perhaps – he could wrench his lover from the doubt and apprehension that clouded his expression as well as from _Mary Morstan’s_ unwelcome, intrusive, inappropriate, loathsome attentions.

He couldn’t remember.

Anything.

He wandered the halls of his Mind Palace, past ideas and memories and blood-warm sentiment until he was stopped at a scratched steel door, bolted fast against him.

He couldn’t remember.

Anything.

He saw everything and nothing as the version of himself in his head beat against the barricaded doors of what he could not remember. His ears were buzzing white noise and the pain in his skull thumped a sharp staccato in his skull hut on the outside, he was still and calm as a statue.

Sherlock turned away from the locked door and veered sharply down a barren hallway before he turned left into a door that resembled the one to his and John’s bedroom. That door opened easily enough and inside was the most recent memory he could summon was of a half-argument the two of them had had over some tedious and minor property damage and an experiment involving bruising patterns.

That had been…. That had been January. The glimpse out the window that Sherlock had gleaned between bouts of medically induced unconsciousness told him it was midsummer.

At least six months of his memory was gone.

Half a year was a blank slate.

“Please,” John said again, and the raw hurt in his voice made Sherlock ache deep and hard in his chest. A second of silence passed and then _Mary Morstan_ sighed and said, “Okay.”

Sherlock hated her. He hated her, viscerally, for considering to deny John something he clearly needed and he hated her twice over for the fact that John needed anything from her at all. He hated her so much that he could have choked on it.

The door to Sherlock’s hospital room opened. John took two steps in, eyes widening when he saw the detective was awake. Standing just behind him was a petit blonde woman in her mid-thirties wearing sensible brown boots with 1.5 inch heels, a flowing knee-length blue skirt, and blue-and-brown jumper that was tight without being indecent.

Spot of black ink on her right wrist, writer’s callous on the first knuckle of her right middle finger, delicate silver watch on the left wrist, more expensive than her silver-and-glass necklace and earring set. Far less expensive than the plain diamond engagement ring on her left ring finger. Secondhand leather purse. Very little makeup.

Mary Morstan was lovely, if you liked that sort of thing. She was exactly the kind of lovely, wholesome, boring woman that Sherlock had frightened away from John in droves before the doctor had finally realized that he was as in love with Sherlock as Sherlock had been desperately devoted to him.

The rest was white noise. Sherlock was drowning in white noise, lost in the time he’d lost and trying to bully his way through locked doors in the halls of his mind palace. His ribs and back were agony, his head a pounding mess of shooting pain, and Sherlock didn’t care. He had to…

“Sherlock.”

He had to…

“Dammit, Sherlock, stop this. Stop it, now.”

John was…

“I will call your brother, I swear I will.”

John just knew. In the space of a second he’d gone from standing awkwardly in the doorway to right beside Sherlock. He was forcing the detective to meet his eyes with one hand under his chin, the other on his shoulder.

Sherlock was beating on the door in his mind with fists, his knuckles bleeding, and his wrists aching. He felt John beside him, but he couldn’t see him. He only knew that warmth, like summer sunshine in the heart of winter.

“Sherlock!” His voice took on the tone of the Army Captain buried deep under the doctor’s unfortunate jumper. It was a command in every syllable, an order that Sherlock could not ignore.

_Come back to me. From wherever you’ve gone, Sherlock Holmes, come back to me right now._

It was like a lifeline. His John, his partner, his friend, and caretaker was calling him back. Sherlock could feel those hands on his face and arm, could almost see the blue eyes that bore into his, as if breaking the surface of water from the deepest depths of a freezing, black lake. Sherlock followed his husband into the world.

“Welcome back,” the doctor muttered, relocating his hand from Sherlock’s chin to his neck, rubbing gently with his thumb in a way that Sherlock couldn’t help but be calmed by. This time, however, it was too important. Sherlock would not allow himself to be calm.

The detective wrapped his fingers around John’s wrist and leaned forward in defiance of his screaming ribs until his forehead was resting against John’s sternum. He sighed slightly when he felt John’s free hand come up to rest on the back of his husband’s aching head.

“You have a scar on your pinky.” The detective said and John’s eyebrows rose at the accusatory tone, “It wasn’t there six months ago. You have a new scar and it’s too recent for me to remember. I remember misappropriating Mrs. Hudson’s washer –”

“You _devastated_ Mrs. Hudson’s washer, Sherlock.” There was mirth in John’s voice, the first real sign of life Sherlock had seen since John had kissed him that first night he woke and the doctor’s voice was the only thing keeping the pain at bay. Sherlock found himself grinning slightly, “semantics.”

The detective sobered, “But that’s it. I don’t remember anything after six months ago.”

“Six months…” John did some mental math and then closed his eyes, biting his bottom lip in that way Sherlock recognized as preceding Rather Bad News.

“What?”

“Nothing,” John said a little too quickly, “It’s just a hell of a time to forget, Sherlock.”

“I’m beginning to see that.” Sherlock finally turned to the unwanted spectator in their moment and, as if only just remembering Mary Morstan’s presence himself, John pushed Sherlock back almost guiltily and said, “You need to rest.”

“I’m fine, John.”

“You’re not, though. You need rest and you need to lie down and let those rib heal and you need to mind your blood pressure because you have a nasty head injury and I’m your doctor and you’re going to listen to me.” His tone brooked no argument and Sherlock was ware enough of his situation to know that in a different one, that tone would have been _doing things_ to him.

“I’ well enough to discuss Miss Morstan’s case,” Sherlock assured with only the smallest hint of venom.

“My what?” She looked from John to Sherlock and back, but her right hand was nervously twisting the engagement ring around her left finger as she did. It was an unconscious gesture, Sherlock doubted she realized that she was doing it.

He smirked, obvious.

“You brought her in with you and never spoke a word to her. You argued outside, but she remained silent during your alarmingly short visit. Her entire manner shows that she is uncomfortable in this situation, yet she doesn’t wait outside. She’s wearing an engagement ring – a rather cheap one at that. I don’t think her fiancé put much thought into it, it’s far too generic. He wants marriage, but has no particular interest in love. Bad breakup on his end, possibly a failed first marriage… more likely an ongoing divorce as evidenced by the haste to which the engagement was proposed. And now she’s standing here with you and looking for all the free world as if she wished the floor would open up and claim her… ah.”

“Sherlock,” John warned in that voice he used when he was trying to talk Sherlock off a ledge.

 “Don’t waste your breath, John, it’s blindingly obvious.” Sherlock flopped as gently as he could onto the bed, favoring his ribs and staring up at the ceiling. “Condolences, miss Morstan.” He added, as an afterthought, and for John’s sake.

 “Excuse me?” the woman asked, bristling slightly. John put a hand on her arm, a gesture that Sherlock did not like one bit.

Rolling his eyes, the detective spared her a glance, “your fiancé is not _missing_ , as you clearly feared; he went back to his _wife_. Honestly, John, you really should have been able to figure this one out on your own. Clearly he is still in love with her. They reached some kind of reconciliation. Allow me to state the painfully obvious, shall I? Don’t get involved with married men.”

The woman brushed past John in her rush out the door.

“Was that necessary, Sherlock?” John’s voice was low, Sherlock had disappointed him, again.

“Yes,” the detective replied, “she is attracted to the emotionally unavailable, and was turning that gaze to you. I didn’t like it.”

“I have to go after her,” John sighed, running agitated fingers though his blond-gray hair, “I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

“Don’t go,” Sherlock said, “It’s not as if she needs us anymore.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” It sounded hollow as he wandered towards the door, “goodnight Sherlock.”

The doctor didn’t look back as he reached for the door handle and then was gone.

Sherlock felt like he’d just missed something important.

 

There they were, the promised next day, and John was laughing at him almost as if things were okay when they both knew that things were anything but. John refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong as he checked the detective’s vitals. Anyone who didn’t know him as absolutely as Sherlock would probably not even notice that John’s skin was too pale and his eyes seemed perpetually ringed faintly pink. Something was eating him alive and he would not talk about it.

It took a little over five weeks for Sherlock to heal completely and he was about to lose his mind. “One week,” he growled, “You said one week. You said ‘observations’. You did not say that you were going to let Mycroft keep me prisoner in this blasted hospital until my brain rotted from disuse.”

John rolled his eyes and checked the detective’s vitals. John had been in and out of Sherlock’s company in uneven chunks of time over the past month, delivering increasingly happy prognoses and looking increasingly less happy about them.

Sherlock had, as a matter of fact, been anything but idle. Lestrade, either for Sherlock’s sake or as a huge favor to John, had been texting Sherlock with every blindingly obvious case that came across the Detective Inspector’s desk. Sherlock reacted with token annoyance and ignored John’s knowing smile with a huff that was not-at-all-childish.

Sherlock took a moment to study his lover, really looking at him for the first time in days. There were dark circles under John’s blue eyes, bruises from a long night battling insomnia. His blonde hair was stuck up at odd angles and his clothes were faintly rumpled.

_Sleepless nights, but not at the hospital. Clothes clean but unchanged. Sweet, chemical smells of the wrong soap and the wrong detergent. John hasn’t changed soaps in ten years, why—?_

“Stop it, Sherlock.” John’s soft voice cut through his deductions, scattering them like an unstable house of cards before Sherlock could make any kind of conclusion of the puzzle pieces in front of him.

“Stop what?” the detective prompted automatically. It wasn’t so much a matter of Sherlock playing dumb as it was his absolute love of watching John play with clues and make deductions and look into Sherlock the way that Sherlock looked into him. Very few people in the world had ever seen the detective without his clothes on, but John was the only person who had ever seen him naked. Sherlock absolutely loved it.

The doctor sighed, “no, Sherlock. You know what you were doing and I am not in the mood. To answer your _spoken_ question; Mycroft is the government. The government said ‘Keep him ‘til his ribs heal’ and A &E was hardly about to argue.”

“Childish,” Sherlock groused, “What good reason could Mycroft possibly have to keep me until my ribs healed?”

John, damn him, actually leveled Sherlock with his own specialized brand of the _I-can-not-believe-the-stupidity-that-just-dribbled-from-your-mouth_ look and said, “Sherlock, try to remember who it is you’re trying to bullshit. If he’d let you out with three broke ribs, you’d have been back in twelve hours with one of them lodged in your lung because you are physically incapable of staying out of trouble.”

Sherlock, rendered momentarily speechless, followed John around the room with his eyes. John wore faded, acid-washed blue jeans that had seen better days and a soft black cotton t-shirt with the name of some American band from the seventies scrawled on the front. As he watched, his stomach tightened with the hot need that had been growing under his chest for weeks.

After that incident with _Mary_ – Sherlock put a nasty internal emphasis on her name – John had been distant with him. Attentive, but no affectionate, and it was driving Sherlock insane.

When John reached into a cabinet and a strip of is skin flashed in the gap between shirt and jeans, Sherlock felt white-hot desire flash somewhere behind his pelvic bone. His gut twisted and his heart rate shot up a good thirty BPM.

In an instant, John had gone from standing next to the bed to being pinned to the mattress, Sherlock holding him there with a hand splayed greedily under the hem of John’s shirt, across the skin of his waist and blue eyes met blue eyes an instant before the detective claimed the doctor’s lips in a searing kiss.

John arched into it, instinctive, and desperate and unguarded for the first time since Sherlock had woken in this stupid fucking hospital bed. Sherlock recalled the shuttered looks and weary distance and clinical touches that left Sherlock resentful and confused and aching harshly under his ribs from something that had nothing to do with his hospital stay.

It hit Sherlock like a punch to the gut. The need; a force inside of himself that swirled like a black hole in his chest, frightening the usually unflappable man with its overpowering intensity. Suddenly, the room was too big and too cold and John was too far away. Every bit of him that wasn’t touching the doctor itched like frost bite and he couldn’t think of anything but John, naked and sweating and he didn’t care who was fucking whom as long as John was radiating heat and melting the ice that had suddenly formed in Sherlock’s veins.

“John,” it was a growl, a whimper, a command and a plea all rolled into one small syllable and dripping from Sherlock’s tongue as he felt his tenuous grasp of control and sanity slip away. He imagined himself opening John up and crawling inside and curling into a tight ball behind John’s ribs. He’d live under the supernova of John’s heart and John could never push him away again.

He was sinking deeper under the ice and his control was almost gone, and his Mind Palace was buried under an avalanche and he couldn’t even warn John that it was happening before it did.

His eye were open, filmed with frost, and he dimly noted how his left hand – free of its cast for two weeks now – was pinning the doctor to the mattress by one naked shoulder, though he couldn’t remember divesting the smaller man of his top. John’s body was a mass of tight muscles quivering under the thin padding of a body that was not as young as it used to be but was far from undesirable.  

His other hand was yanking at the strings of his stupid hospital robe with clumsy fingers. He was aware of his mouth being filled with his partner’s bottom lip warm breath ghosting over his lips like a summer breeze in the dead of winter. John was trying to speak, to protest as he’d been protesting for a month, and Sherlock couldn’t stand to hear it.

John’s hand was like a fresh brand on his hip, pulling and pushing conflictingly. Sherlock didn’t – Couldn’t – understand the hesitation. God, he was slipping, slipping under the ice.

The last time Sherlock has slipped this far had been a result of a very bad two weeks in which he and John had barely seen one another and Sherlock had been either short-tempered or aloof at any time in which the two spent together. It had been in late spring, well past the appropriate weather for his long coat and scarf but every day he’d felt a chill creep deeper into his body.

As he lay on the couch, bundled in a blanket that smelled comfortingly of John’s herbal soap, the doctor had come in and placed a worried hand on the detective’s forehead, and Sherlock was suddenly and violently gripped in the throes of what he privately referred to as the John Disease.

His whole body had gone rigid under the touch, his back arching and his eyes closed tight, blind to John’s startled and concerned expression. All he’d been able to feel was the incredible warmth that flowed from John’s light touch and right into Sherlock’s heart.

John was an exploding star, emitting the warmth Sherlock lacked and the results of such had been some of the most violent, painful, reckless and goddamned amazing sex either man had ever experienced. Sherlock was going to freeze to death without it and he didn’t care what bruises or bite marks or fingernail-deep gash marks along his arms and chest John administered to him. Sherlock wanted all of it.

“Sherlock, wait. Stop.” John’s words fell on ears full of cold water, “Sherlock, please, I only have s-so much – ah – self-control…”

Sherlock wasn’t listening. He was tasting, freezing, burning, gasping for air that didn’t want to come, shivering, turning blue, fading away. He stopped being Sherlock Holmes and became a ghost that only John could touch.

_Heart rate: accelerated. Obvious physical cues of arousal. Breathing erratic, back arched._

_Conclusion: John wants sex. Specifically, sex with me._

_Reaction: responsive arousal._

_Concern: why is John trying to stop?_

Sherlock felt John’s resistance slip a little as the doctor’s blunt fingers dug into Sherlock’s shoulders and pulled him down hard, capturing his mouth in a fierce kiss that left Sherlock reeling and aching and breathless. He loved John, he loved him so deeply it was almost too much. He loved him as desperately and destructively as anything the world had ever seen.

John took Sherlock’s waist and rolled them over until the detective was pinned under him, holding him to the bed and kneeling intently over him. Sherlock looked up into wide-blown eyes and the expression on his lover’s face grounded him so hard, it felt as if all the breath had been punched from his lungs.

John was in pain. He looked like just touching Sherlock was like getting kicked in the chest. There was something going on, something important, and _John wasn’t telling him_.

“John. What-”

Before he could finish his question, the doctor was off him, off the bed, and whipping furiously at the corners of his eyes. John wasn’t a crier, John seldom ever cried. But here he was, trying not to let the treacherous drops fall in front of Sherlock.

Sherlock, his skin lined with blue veins and his teeth chattering helplessly, tentatively lifted himself and took a cautious step toward his husband, twisting the gold band nervously around his finger.

“John…?”

“Shut up, Sherlock,” the doctor breathed, “Just shut up for ten seconds. I need…I…” he growled and threw up his hands, his eyes rimmed red, “Fifteen years, Sherlock. Fifteen fucking years and of all of them you get to throw away... I wish I could forget what you have, Holmes, I really do. Do you have any idea what it means to carry this alone? To have this knowledge and not even be able to begin explaining to you… God, everything was okay. Everything was starting to be okay. _I_ was starting to be okay. Not ecstatic, no, but happy enough in my own way. And now this! Just, Jesus fuck, Sherlock, I can’t. You can’t. It’s not fair!”

“Why?!” Sherlock shouted back, letting five weeks of slowly-building worry and resentment seethe through the word, “You’re punishing me for something I clearly can’t remember doing and you don’t even have the decency or the _nerve_ to tell me what the bloody hell I did so that I can make it right!”

“Nerve?” John inquired mildly and Sherlock knew from a decade and a half of experience that he had reached a line. John’s voice had taken that razor sharp pleasantness that promised Bad Things for whoever it was directed at.

Sherlock didn’t care, “I accredit you with far too much spine if you insist on tiptoeing around the issue as you have been for the past five weeks.”  

“And I’ve always accredited you with too much heart, Sherlock.”

Oh.

Sherlock felt slightly gut-punched and a bit dizzy from the way the blood had drained from his face at John’s words.

( _“You machine!” “Most of the time, I didn’t even think you were human.” “Friend?”  “-colleague.”_ )

No. Yes. That was fair, wasn’t it? Sherlock himself always rather thought John gave him too much credit in that area. Why should it matter that John had finally caught on? That was fair. That was fine. That was all fine.

“No, it wasn’t” John whispered, “That wasn’t fair or fine at all, Sherlock.”

The doctor pulled Sherlock to him in a tight, fierce hug, their bodies hard against each other and the detective wrapped both arms around the smaller man’s shoulders, his face buried in blonde hair, “That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

“I love you,” the detective rasped, his breathing hard and his heart lodged in his throat, “I love you, John, and you’re in pain and you won’t fucking tell me _why_! I can’t fix this. I…” He huffed a hard breath, “I’ll figure it out, okay? You don’t have to tell me. I’ll solve this. I’ll figure it out.”

He pulled John back to him and almost missed the muffled whisper, “I hope not.”


	4. Chapter Three

            _Why did you never feel pain?_

 _You always feel it, Sherlock, (The Irish brogue was slurred with madness and boredom and maybe the barest hint of sympathy) but you don’t have to_ fear _it._

_(Sherlock looked into the dark depths of brilliant, soulless eyes and knew that he would always be grateful for this man. Hate him though the detective did, Jim Moriarty had carved out a place in his mind and in that place, he was immortal.)_

_Pain, heartbreak, loss… death. It’s all good. It’s all fine._

_(Sherlock closed his eyes. Morarty would never be dead here. Bound and chained in a deep, dark corner of Sherlock’s mind palace where he couldn’t hurt anyone except Sherlock)_

_I don’t know how to beat him._

_Yes you do, Sherlock. You_ do _._

 _I can’t do that to_ him _._

_(Moriarty rolled his eyes, haughty and bored and disappointed even from beneath a layers of sweat and filth.)_

_You want to though, don’t you? (A smile, a sign of life in those vacant brown eyes) You always wondered, didn’t you? How far you can go? What it would take?_

_(The only experiment Sherlock never performed. The question that gnawed at him with the genuine terror that he might ever find out. And the self-destructive desire to push until he found his answer.)_

            Sherlock woke to the insect-buzz of a mobile phone vibrating against the table near his hospital bed. His head throbbed dully, his tongue felt fused to the roof of his stone-dry mouth and his stomach growled angry and annoyingly insistent.

            The last silvery tendrils of sleep clung to him as he tried to recall the dreams that had plagued him in the night.

            Moriarty. Bound and chained in a dirty round room with padded walls. Sherlock knew it well; it was the room he’d constructed to house the manifestation of Moriarty in his memories. That dungeon room was buried deep in his mind, as far down as he could bury his complicated feelings for the dead Consulting criminal.

            Moriarty had been Sherlock’s perfect opposite, intellectually. He was the dark mirror through which Sherlock looked. They had shared a connection that blurred the boundaries of friends and enemies because no one else could ever understand them as perfectly as they’d understood each other.

            And because of that, Sherlock had not been able to let the man die, completely. He’d built a hateful shrine to him in his head, mortared with the intimacy of enmity.

            The mobile phone buzzed again.

            “Go away.”

            “Sherlock,” his older brother sighed, “don’t be a child.”

            Mycroft Holmes sat in the chair usually occupied by John with his signature umbrella resting against the arm and a cup of tea balanced on his knee. His suit was black, impeccable, and cost more than rent at 221B. Sherlock savagely hoped the cup overturned on his perfectly creased trousers.  He’d lost more than a stone since the last time Sherlock could remember seeing him and the blandly congenial smile on his smug reptile face told Sherlock that he knew it, too.

            “Where’s John?”

            “Not here, I daresay.” Mycroft spared a glance for his mobile before placing it back onto the table, where it lay in repose. “Doctor Watson –”

            “Really?”

            The elder Holmes’ expression morphed into a familiar pinched expression, “What?”

            “‘ _Doctor Watson’_?” Sherlock sneered, “The man has been your brother in law for over a decade, Mycroft. You’ve suddenly returned to a last-name basis with my husband?”

            Mycroft eyed Sherlock for a long and penetrating moment before his eyebrows rose high on his head and his pinched expression became one of mild surprise, “Good lord, you truly _can’t_ remember, can you?”

            _Mycroft; seven-point-two pounds lighter than last recollection. Fine gray hairs at temples. Slight purpling under eyes and faintly blood-shot eyes from too little sleep. Very minute reddening of scratched skin on jaw from a hasty shaving. Sleepless nights. Worry lines between brows. Stiffness in neck from sleeping in chairs._

Sherlock felt his guts roil uncomfortably as he considered the very disturbing fact that Mycroft was actually and _openly_ worried about him. He felt like he was ten years old again, hiding in his big brother’s closet and trying to drown out the sounds of his parents arguing a floor below.

            Sherlock realized for the first time since waking up that this past month and change had been the longest he had ever spent in a hospital not pertaining to drug abuse. Mycroft had not come to visit him those two times in his youth when he’d stuck a needle in his arm and hoped to a godless sky that he would just die and be done with it. The older Holmes had simply footed the bill, kept it off his medical records, kept him out of prison and otherwise pretended that it never happened.

            “Sherlock…” Mycroft took a slow, deep breath and tilted his head toward the ceiling, his voice softer and more strained than the detective would have expected, “I have spoken to your neurologist and the loss of your short-term memory is most likely not permanent. However your worrying ability to ‘delete’ memories at random and on demand does make it difficult to be sure. You’re supposed to meet with him this afternoon before you’re signed out of the hospital.”

            He looked as if he wanted to say more, but he held his tongue. At any other time, Sherlock would have been convinced that it was a deliberate move to pique his curiosity and force him to ask Mycroft for more information. He was still half-convinced that that was the case, Mycroft was a master manipulator and had absolute command of every one of his facilities. If he was showing emotions there was no doubt it was because he _wanted_ them seen.

            But Sherlock knew his brother almost as well as Mycroft knew him. The Holmes boys hadn’t always been entwined in a pointless rivalry and Sherlock had not always looked to him as a dangerous, overbearing jailor. The fact was, there had been a time in Sherlock’s life when he loved and admired no one more than the man who sat beside his hospital bed and deliberately withheld key pieces to the knotted puzzle of Sherlock’s fissured memory.

*         

            “Sherlock, do you want to hear this story or not?” Mycroft sighed, pulling his brother back from whatever dark corner of his mind the little boy had wandered off to. Sherlock was ten years old and in bed with a cold one week before Christmas, going out of his mind with boredom and taking everyone in the house with him. Mycroft, seventeen and on holiday from school was left to sit at his bedside and read him Agatha Christie mysteries. 

            “The doctor did it,” Sherlock said with the kind of disdain that only a ten-year-old could exact. Mycroft scowled at the side of his brother’s head, framed by wild black curls and closed the cover of _The Murder of Roger Akroyd_ with an audible snap.

            “You cheated,” Mycroft accused, not truly mad at his brother but feeling as if Sherlock should at least try to understand why an outside party might take exception to being pestered for an hour to read a story only to be informed fifteen pages in that he had already worked out the ending.

            Not that it had been terribly difficult. Agatha Christie was probably the best mystery writer of the twentieth century, but she was no match for the Holmes boys. Sherlock loved hearing his big brother say things like that because it made him feel, for a very short while, as if his abilities were some kind of special bond between them and not simply the source of the little raven-haired boy’s constant alienation and occasional abuse by his peers. 

            Mummy only noticed the torn collars and purple patches of bruised skin every once in a while. Sherlock lied easily; he told her _no, mummy, I was playing tag with boys from school. No, mummy, I fell out of a tree._ He knew that her attention was back to her experiments and calculations before the words even really registered.  
            Sherlock coughed deep and hard and Mycroft leaned over to rub his back gently until the coughing subsided. There was a yellowing bruise on the little boy’s ribs.

            That was the real reason Sherlock was out of school; mummy had paid attention.

            She was absent-minded on the best of days, her mind always more than half in The Work, and Sherlock had gotten complacent about his deceptions. He’d foolishly forgotten that his mother was the brilliant mind that his own genetic gifts had emulated. He’d forgotten that she could – when the occasion struck her – be the most frightening observant person on the planet.

            And mummy had found out.

            “How could you keep this from me?” She was screaming at dad, furious and blaming her husband for keeping her in the dark.

            Dad had known.

Dad wasn’t brilliant like his wife and sons. He was completely average, actually. He couldn’t really relate to his sons on an intellectual level and tried to balance that out with love. Allard Holmes couldn’t talk to his sons about theorems or deductions. He couldn’t play catch with them in the back yard. He had nothing in common with his boys, so he tried to find equilibrium in being a good father. In fighting the right fights that his kids still occasionally needed fought.

He’d gone to the school, he’d shouted at teachers who turned a blind eye to the tears in Sherlock’s clothes and the bruises that Sherlock told them were from a social life and active boyhood, even though every teacher in the school knew that Sherlock didn’t have any friends.

            Sherlock had insulted them all at some point. He was too honest, too observant, and he didn’t know how to pretend to be normal-but-more the way that Mycroft had. Sherlock couldn’t bite it back or dumb it down or bury it under a layer of polite disinterest the way Mycroft could.

            He saw, and he told. What had started out as compulsion quickly turned to spite. He told them truths they didn’t want to hear because he was contemptuous of the idea that people valued emotions over facts. He didn’t _make_ the first-form history teacher carry on an extramarital affair with the second-form maths professor. If they knew it was wrong, if the idea that it might be public knowledge was not acceptable to them, they shouldn’t have _done_ it. Or at least they should have been clever enough to not get caught out by a child.

            Sherlock was so much smarter than anyone around him. And no one could ever understand the _lonliness_ of it… no one but Mycroft.

            “Why didn’t you ever _notice_?” Dad hollered back at his wife, “You saw the signs, Vivi, you can’t possibly have missed them. You were just too busy with other things to give Sherlock any thought.”

            They’d been going at it like that for an hour. Shouting accusations at one another. Neither party was in the right or wrong, exactly, and Sherlock resented them equally. He’d worked to keep his mother unaware of his situation at school. He’d done everything in his limited power to get his dad to drop it, to stop coming to the school, to let it go. Because he was not going to stop being the way that he was and his father was fighting a battle against the boundless stupidity of the officials of his school and it was not a battle that the Holmes patriarch was ever going to win.

            Their argument was useless because their interference was useless. Teachers never stopped turning away when Sherlock was pushed or hit. It didn’t do any _good_. It just added a layer of humiliation to the proceedings when the idiots who tore his clothes and bruised his body taunted him about how his daddy was going to come in and take his crybaby son’s part. 

            Sherlock never cried. Not unless he wanted to. And he never told his parents anything. But they found out. And he hated their help.

            The youngest brother had outlined all of this to Mycroft in frustrated detail the past two days as mummy, apparently making up for past accidental negligence, and dad, too caught up in the righteous indignation of being the parent upon whose shoulders that accidental negligence had been dumped, had both managed to overlook the fact that Sherlock had a fever, and his cough was getting worse.

            “Mycroft?” Sherlock’s voice was small and soft and rough from the way those coughs tore at his throat, “Is it my fault?”

            Mycroft didn’t have to ask what his little brother meant by that. The truth was, Mycroft blamed neither of his parents. He blamed himself.

            He wanted to protect his baby brother. He wanted to make the people who hurt him, the people who ignored that he was hurt, very sorry. He wanted to walk in and smile that polite, politician smile he’d been practicing and methodically ruin their pathetic little lives.

            “No.”

            “It is,” the younger boy insisted.

            “Why did you ask me if you already think it is?”

            “Because you wouldn’t lie to me.”

            “Exactly,” Mycroft said, “And so, there you have it.”

            Sherlock sighed, “You don’t know you’re lying. You can control it. You can make them all think that you’re like them.” That was true. Mycroft was a genius, and he was a genius with finesse. Even at Sherlock’s age, he hadn’t been as blunt and half-feral in his brilliance as Sherlock was. As unyielding in his honesty.

            Sherlock didn’t want to bend to the world; he wanted someone to hear his brute truths, to withstand the cut of quicksilver tongue, and to love him for it. He wanted someone to just accept him and admire him for exactly as he was without him having to tamper down on the things that made him objectively extraordinary.

            That wish would not come true until the day a handsome blonde Army Doctor limped his way into a hospital lab many year to come.

            Sherlock rubbed his face into the pillow agitatedly and whispered, “I wish I wasn’t a freak.”

            “Freak” was not a word Mycroft had ever allowed people to use around Sherlock, but he could not watch over him all the time. It was the insult Sherlock was becoming the most familiar with, certainly. Even the occasional “psychopath” with all of its dark implications never cut Sherlock quite as deeply as that one, simple word.

               And Mycroft would never forgive himself for that moment when Sherlock finally believed it. 

*

            Sherlock had deleted that memory ages ago, on Mycroft’s request. He’d promised his older brother that he’d cut out that whole miserable week and never go back to it. That horrible last Christmas before Mycroft went off to university and Christmases more or less stopped being a Holmes family event.

            Mycroft and Sherlock were never as close as they were then. As Sherlock got older and his social and recreational habits got progressively worse, Mycroft had stopped being the older brother that he idolized and became the overbearing jailor that he resented.

            But Sherlock had deleted that memory. It should have been gone.

            Why was it suddenly back?

            Sherlock sought his brother’s cool gaze and asked, “do you remember… Agatha Christie?”

             It was fascinating, watching the blood drain from Mycroft’s round and weathered face. He lifted his forgotten tea with hands that did not shake, despite the tension in his wrists and took a small sip of the lukewarm beverage.

               “I thought you deleted that particular memory, Sherlock.” His voice was too even, too calm. It was fascinating to Sherlock to see all the different minute emotions that played along his brother’s face. A thirty-year-old wound taped over with a Band-Aid which Sherlock had just savagely ripped off. There was anger in the creases beside his eyes, worry in the brackets around his mouth, there was protectiveness in the way he looked at Sherlock and resentment in the way he looked away.

               That fight, the week their father had left before he’d come back a more subdued man, the fact that Christmas was effectively dead to the Holmes brothers… that was all Sherlock’s fault.

               Mycroft never said it and would viciously deny it to anyone who did. But Sherlock had never been stupid, had never been unobservant and had never been blind. If Sherlock had been normal, if he had been able to bury his abnormalities like Mycroft had, then their father would not have left them.

It was just one more item on the long list of things that the Holmes boys didn’t talk about.        

               The pregnant tension in the room was disrupted by the arrival of a nurse. Medium height, medium build, medium intelligence and medium attractiveness. To Sherlock she was a study in ordinary. Her scrubs were wrinkled, her shoes scuffed and her hair pulled into a haphazard pony-tail.

               “Good morning,” she said and then her eyes found Sherlock’s, “Sorry to interrupt, but Doctor Reardon is waiting in Neurology for you. He wants to go over your situation before you are cleared to leave today.”

               So, that was why Mycroft had chosen that day to visit; Sherlock was being released from hospital. The younger Holmes glanced at the clock on the wall; half past twelve in the afternoon  on the day he was released and no sign of John.

Strange.

               Sherlock made it clear that he didn’t care but a look from Mycroft told him that his options were basically none. With an entirely put-upon sigh, he allowed himself to be ushered into a wheel chair (completely unnecessary) and carted off to the Neurology wing of the hospital.

                Doctor Reardon was a man only five or so years younger than Sherlock with light brown hair and soft brown eyes. His healthy tan and toned forearms – _shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, faint tan-line on right hand from a wristwatch that was not currently being worn. No tan line from any kind of wedding ring: unmarried._ – suggested that he was an avid appreciator of out-door activities. If Sherlock had to guess, he’d say rock-climbing going from the faint callouses on his fingers and the ragged edges of his nails which retained faint traces of gripping chalk.

               “Mr. Holmes,” the doctor said, flashing a grin of even white teeth and taking Sherlock’s hand in his, “Apologies for not meeting with you before now, but your case was handed over to me only yesterday.”

               “What happened to my first doctor?”

               Doctor Reardon shrugged, “hospital transfer. I honestly didn’t ask a lot of questions.” His smile was handsome and genuine when he flashed it, “No matter, his files were up to date and that brings us to you, mister Holmes.”

                Sherlock side-eyed his brother who gave the barest twitch of one shoulder whixh told him everything he could possibly want to know. Sherlock didn’t care. He found everything about this hospital unbearable and he wanted to be rid of it.

He wanted to be with John, whose absence was like an itch in the back of the detective’s throat; annoying and distracting. What could possibly have been more important than being with Sherlock the day he got out of the hospital? More likely, Mycroft had somehow pulled priority over Sherlock in some nefarious and devious way. It would not have been beneath the elder Holmes to flood John with inane hospital work just to open a window of opportunity for himself.

               Feeling comfortable blaming Mycroft, Sherlock tuned into Doctor Reardon as the neurologist pinned photos of Sherlock’s MRI results to the light box on the wall. Sherlock found himself wondering what the actual name for those boards were called. It wasn’t pertinent, it wasn’t particularly important, but he remembered once that John had referred to them as “light box” and had never thought to ask him if that was their official name.

               And then Sherlock realized that his mind, _his_ mind, had been wandering. “I,” Sherlock rubbed his throbbing temples, “I can’t seem to focus.” He felt like he’d been dosed with melatonin.

               It wasn’t the first time he’d felt that way in the weeks since first waking up, but in that claustrophobic hell of a hospital room there was very little that had actually required his attention aside from John’s visits and Lestrade’s utterly moronic cold-cases. (Honestly, how the met functioned was the greatest mystery Sherlock had ever faced. It was a wonder they hadn’t burned down the Met in his absence.)Now, though, it left him feeling wrong-footed and disjointed.  

               Mycroft looked startled, but Doctor Reardon didn’t seem concerned, “a lack of focus is to be expected. Sherlock, you damaged your brain. It is still trying to heal itself and it won’t all be working at optimal capacity.” The amazing thing, Sherlock thought, was that this moron actually thought that that was comforting.

               He pointed to the “light box” and said, “Based on the MRI results, the actual neural tissue is in fine order. The memory loss might be psychosomatic, based around an emotional trauma as opposed to the physical one. I have the sinking feeling that some of the worst memories of this past year will be coming back to you sooner than anyone would like.” His expression turned, if possible, even more sympathetic, “Furthermore, Mycroft here has informed me that there are certain aspects of your medical history that you would rather avoid discussing. In this case, I have no choice.”

               Ah, of course. Sherlock rolled his eyes, slouched in his wheelchair and glowered like a petulant teenager. Of course. That.

               “Because of your… _ability_ ,” he chose the word with care, “to selectively delete memories, there is no way to tell how much of the missing eighteen months were the result of the accident and how much might have been by your own will.”

               “None.” Sherlock answered simply. Sherlock only deleted memories that were unimportant. He didn’t delete John.

               Reardon glanced from Sherlock to Mycroft and cleared his throat awkwardly, “right, well… right. Okay. Due to the nature of your Asperger’s syndrome,” he glanced apologetically at Sherlock’s stormy eyes, “We don’t yet know how this might affect your mind. It’s not just your memories that have been knocked out of their proper place, Mr. Holmes. You have already noticed that your focus and attention span have been effected and while I am confident that those issues are temporary, I can’t yet assess just how extensive the damage is.”

               “Will it affect him physically?” Mycroft piped up with a question that Sherlock found utterly superfluous to the knowledge that _his brain was broken_.

               “For the most part, aside from the injuries, his health is good. He would do well to eat something once in a while.” That was said so pointedly, John would have been proud, “but otherwise, he’s the picture of physical health. He might experience bouts of dizziness and vertigo.  He’ll get headaches, but he won’t be crippled. He should probably not overexert himself with running across rooftops for a few months.”

               As if Mycroft would have allowed that. Sherlock remembered when he’d been sick as a boy, his brother all but tied him to the bed and poured soup down his gullet with a funnel. A man with a brain injury, a doctor for a husband and an elder brother with all the resources of the British government wasn’t going to be having a lot of _fun_ in the near future.

              

               It was almost one by the time the final discharge papers were signed and Mycroft had lifted Sherlock’s mobile. The black car Mycroft favored was making its way slowly to Baker Street and Sherlock was going out of his head. Where the hell was John? Why hadn’t he texted or called or sent bloody currier pigeons?

               He’d known Mycroft wanted to see him, John had said so exhaustingly enough. Sherlock had hated having his elder brother with him surprisingly less than he’d anticipated but that did not excuse the former army doctor from going off completely.

               Mrs. Hudson greeted them at the door, “Sher _lock_!” She pulled the much younger man into a hug, “So glad to see you up an about, dear.”

               Sherlock hugged her back, gentle and fond in a way he had never been with another woman in his whole life. His own mother did not hold the place in his heart that Mrs. Hudson did and it had taken him years to admit it.

               Years, and John. Sherlock eased himself out of her arms and glanced up the stairs to his flat. It felt strange, coming home. There were scuff marks on the left side of the third stair that he didn’t remember and a scratch in the wall about five feet up over the fifth step that he could not recollect. It was frustrating.

               John clearly wasn’t in, there were no sounds coming from behind the closed door of 221B. Sherlock was annoyed about that, too. If John didn’t get home to him soon, Sherlock was going to have a row with him, the likes of which Chip and PIN machines could never match.

               With that thought, he bounded up the stairs… or bounded as much as a man with a brain injury could… and pushed open the door to his flat.

              

It was like walking into a stranger’s house.


	5. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this is a bit of an indulgence, but since it took me about eight million years to post the last chapter, and because this one only took me a few hours to edit from it's original content, I'm putting it up immediately following chapter three.  
> I love you all, you make this a project worth seeing through to the end <3
> 
> -Ink

Sherlock stopped at the threshold and stared into the slightly dusty sitting room. It felt like coming back from the dead all over again. His things were technically in the right places, but there was something off… something missing.

               He went, on legs that did not seem quite even, to his preferred chair, and upended John’s Union Jack pillow as he sat. His science equipment was still on the kitchen table. His books were still on the shelves and scattered about the room. There was some dust over the furniture and there was a smell in the kitchen like an experiment had been left unattended and no one had cleaned it up.

               Odd; neither Mrs. Hudson nor John ever listened to Sherlock when he told them not to touch his experiments.

               John.

               John hadn’t been home in a while.

  _His laptop – gone. Books on the shelf he favored – missing from their place. Favorite mug – Neither in the sink nor the cabinet. Sentimental picture frame Molly had given as a wedding present – missing from the sitting room shelf._

The second bedroom on the third floor had long since become a storage room for the things they’d accumulated through their life together. The boxes lay, untouched, in their places throughout the room.

Sherlock struggled. His life was deductive thinking. Cognitive reasoning. Not since the case of Baskerville did Sherlock find himself reaching a conclusion he couldn’t wrap his mind around.

_Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains – however improbable – must be true._

Impossible. Impossibleimpossible – No. The voice in his head that was always calm and always analytical and always sounded like Mycroft cut through what Sherlock realized was mounting panic; _Sentiment, Sherlock. You’ve grown too accustomed to focusing through the wrong lenses. See, little brother, and observe. Whatever remains, however improbable,_ must _be true._

John didn’t live on Baker Street any longer.

Vaguely, the detective was aware of his name being said very softly. Mycroft, the real Mycroft, had not left, he’d stood still and quiet whilst his little brother made his deductions.

Suddenly, a dozen little cues and clues fell into place, the image started to take shape, and Sherlock didn’t want to see.

John’s clinical touch, his anger, his pain, his mounting despair when Sherlock had tried to bridge their physical gap. The way he’d kissed Sherlock that first night when he realized that Sherlock’s memories were missing. The way he’d grown more and more discomfited and anxious the closer and closer Sherlock got to being released from hospital. The fact that he hadn’t been there the day Sherlock got out.

Stupid. Stupid! How could he have missed it? All of it. So blindingly simple and yet so (impossible).

Words fell like stones from the detective’s suddenly dry lips and shattered the unnatural quiet of the crypt that used to be his home -

“He left me.”

***

John was anxious. Anxious did not begin to cover it. John felt like his skin was all that was keeping him from flying into a thousand different directions and his fingers itched with the effort to not check his mobile phone every thirty seconds.

Sherlock was being released from the hospital that day. He was going back to 221B and he was going to know, instantly, all of the things John had been keeping from him. And he was going to wonder why John had kept them. And John, truthfully, had no good answer. He had not intended to lie to his ex. He had not even intended to keep going back to the hospital. But that first night, when Sherlock had looked at him, and touched him, and with his fingers in the doctor’s hair, had left John so shaken that he just couldn’t stay away.

Sherlock had loved him again. The knowledge had almost brought John Watson to his knees. He’d thought Sherlock had changed his mind, had taken back the things he’d said and wanted to put their life back to rights, with the two of them – together _against the rest of the world_.

When Sherlock had revealed that he was missing eighteen months of his memory the doctor’s heart had broken all over again.

Sherlock didn’t love him _again_ ; he’d just forgotten that he’d ever stopped. It wasn’t the same. When he got his memory back, he was going to resent John for being around at all. Knowing was a constant ache under his ribs, a steel band around his heart that constricted whenever those blue-green eyes sought his from across the expanse of his hospital room.

A hand on his knee brought him out of his thoughts. Mary was looking at him with an expression that was knowing and sympathetic. John managed a strained smile and his hand covered hers.

 _Don’t get involved with married men_ Sherlock had said to her with his patent disdain. He’d never liked Mary, even when she had been nothing but a friend and colleague at the surgery where John worked. She was a secretary whom Sarah had hired to manage the drastic upswing in patients they saw since John had accidently become a minor celebrity as the blogger of Sherlock Holmes.  Sarah had been thrilled.

John had been vaguely aware of her interest two years ago when she had started work there. He’d acknowledged her interest, had been flattered by the attentions of a beautiful woman, but he’d not returned the sentiment in any way. He had been ridiculously happy, in love, and settled down with Sherlock.

It wasn’t until afterwards…

Mary’s family, had been infinitely understanding in the early days of their budding romance. They had welcomed him onto their family, carved out a space in their lives for him to fit.

And if those corners didn’t line up exactly, if there was a crack in his chassis or a chink in his armor where the unfortunate reality of the man John Watson was shone through under the paintwork of the man he was trying to be, they never let on that they’d seen.

Part of that delicate balance was Mary and John’s weekly lunch with her friends.

 Which was exactly what the couple was currently doing, sitting at a table in a posh little cafe in west London. The people who shared their table were those whom Mary had known for years and had sort of enveloped him in the minutiae of their social lives; friends from church (John had never gone until recently, having a relationship with On High which could be summed up with “Hi god, it’s me; John Watson. Please don’t turn me into a pillar of salt.” ), uni mates, and coworkers from previous jobs.

They were the kind of normal, respectable people John would only have seen himself interact with if his life had suddenly turned into a romantic comedy. Three other doctors, a lawyer, a few bankers and one woman whom Mary had known since grade school and who seemed to think being pregnant was an accomplishment in its own right.

Sherlock had been right about that; pregnant women were _smug_.

Mary had introduced him as a former army captain and general practitioner. In a world where he had been Sherlock Holmes’ colleague-friend-lover-husband-blogger-doctor, it was almost novel to be introduced as just Dr. John Watson and nothing else. They had accepted him, carved out a place in their social circle for him, and had been stunningly open-minded when his previous relationship had come to the forefront, thanks to incredibly bad timing on Sherlock’s part.

These people were normal, safe, middle-class and happy to see London for shops and restaurants and history and culture and not for the battleground that John had come to know. They were content.

God, they were _dull_.

 _“Oh you don't want me anywhere near you. You don't want me anywhere near you. Get my fucking head out of your world.”_ The chorus to The Cure’s _Us Or Them_ jingled in John’s lap. It was the ringtone he’d given Sherlock out of anger and it fit so well he’d never changed it. He knew he’d never have the heart to delete him entirely, but he suspected Mary would not appreciate _Love Song_ being the tune that signaled her fiancé’s ex.

John practically jumped out of his seat, nearly knocking a beer onto Sheryl (the pregnant woman – Mary’s Maid of Honor).

“John?” Mary’s voice was concern, but her eyes were warning. They were definitely going to have a talk about this later. John sighed; explaining Sherlock’s memory loss had been difficult. Mary had gotten all the wrong ideas about John’s intentions and he supposed that the exchange she’d witnessed between them in Sherlock’s hospital room had done very little to dissuade her beliefs that John was going to try and use the detective’s amnesia to fix their marriage. That wasn’t what John wanted at all.

He wasn’t going to lie to himself, he still loved the bastard. He always would. But Mary had been there for him when John wasn’t even entirely sure he wanted to keep breathing without Sherlock. When Sherlock had been ‘dead’, John had gone through grey days numbly, half waiting for Sherlock’s last miracle or for his own days and years to quickly pass so that he could finally close his eyes one day and never open them again. He knew that he’d find his friend in that darkness beyond life, and the thought had been comforting.

There was no such comfort in the days and weeks after he and Sherlock had broken up. Everything had been washed red and blue in the kind of pain that defied explanation. If it hadn’t been for Mary’s friendship and then her warmth and love, John couldn’t imagine what he might have done. He was a walking wound; he bled from invisible wounds and every movement battered invisible bruises. Mary had been a balm for his heart and he owed her more, much more, than to abandon her for the man who had taken everything John was and shattered every piece of him.

Still… Sherlock called and John was helpless but to answer.

With a murmured apology and a “be right back” he excused himself and answered Sherlock’s call.

***

Sherlock stumbled over to the skull on the mantel and stared into the dead sockets. He saw nothing. He saw everything. 

_Skull; mineral- Hydroxylapatite - Ca 10(PO4)6(OH)2\. _

He was letters and numbers and chemical equations under seven layers of pale skin and if he cut himself open-  

_C738H1166N812O203S2Fe._

Mycroft advised him to breathe –

_O2. Lungs, brain function, inhale, exhale, inoutinoutin. Hyperventilation._

221B tilted, the detective stood before the fireplace with bleached bone between his hands and the chemical equation for heartbreak that he didn’t know the numbers for. It wasn’t quantifiable, this feeling. It was like his flesh and bone had been peeled away and sentiment hemorrhaged from the tattered remains.

John had left him. _John had left him._

The skull was in his hand, the sliding glass door of the kitchen ( _cup of tea…  Sherlock, we’re out of milk… You know, you could do the shopping every once in a while…  Jesus fuck, Sherlock,_ why _are there two left hands in the fruit drawer?...  Fuck, Sh- Christ. I can’t believe we are going to do this on this table. If we end up with some horrible flesh-eating diseases – ngh, no don’t fucking stop! God, love…)_

CRASH

The skull soared through the door and landed with a satisfying crack on the kitchen floor as the door dissolved into a cascade of broken glass.

               Sherlock twisted the wedding band around his finger. He felt the scrape of the letters on the tender crease below his knuckle.

               “Sherlock…” Mycroft was half placating and half reprimanding him. Calm, collected, ruthless Mycroft. Never a victim of the afflictions of heart which crippled his little brother.

Wasn’t it a wonder? Sherlock actually had one.

What had he done? What had he finally done that had made John go? What had been too much for the ever-patient doctor? They could not live without one another, why didn’t John know that by now?

               “Get out, Mycroft.” There was no venom. No patent disdain. “Go.”

               His older brother, after several second of deliberating whether or not Sherlock was going to throw himself off a building for real, twisted his umbrella in his grip and said, “You’ll call?”

               If he needed anything. If he was about to go back to very bad habits. If he was thinking of doing something foolish.

               Sherlock said nothing.  

               No doubt he was off to tell Mrs. Hudson to keep extra close watch on the wayward genius.

              

               To the casual observer, it would look as if Sherlock Holmes were stumbling around his flat, staring blankly at pieces of furniture and empty wall space.

That was not the case.

               Sherlock’s Mind Palace was not a fixed structure. It was more like a fluid concept of space and matter which he could refer back to in order to navigate the rambunctious inner-workings of his own mind.

               At this particular moment, Sherlock’s Mind Palace was the exact shape and dimensions of 221B.

               Everywhere he looked, there was a memory. He circled the kitchen, heedless of the broken glass which crunched under his shoes as he watched John make endless cups of tea and himself working on experiments and that one time when Sherlock had said something snide and John – in an incredible display of petty vengeance – had back handed several of his samples onto the floor. Sherlock had retaliated by scooping up the remaining frog entrails and casually dropping them into John’s tea. Sherlock had thought it was going to be a fight, but his lover had surprised him. John laughed, called him a git and enticed him to bed.

               In the sitting room, Sherlock found himself sifting through the minutiae and landing on a memory. A scene unfolded in front of his eyes like shadow theatre and he watched with the same wry amusement he’d felt at the time.

               They were on the couch, naked under one of John’s comforters as the fire roared across the room. It was a little after noon on a winter day and the sun cast gray light across the walls. John was nestled against him on the narrow seating space, leg thrown over his as they grinded out a slow, lazy rhythm that would bring them both to a gentle climax. It was unhurried and loving.

               Sherlock remembered the feeling of those strong, calloused fingers gliding down the path of his spine, over his ass and squeezing a pale thigh. He’d kissed the detective’s lips and neck and claimed his collar bone in loving little nips as he whispered words like _perfect,_ and _brilliant_ , and _I love you so fucking much, Sherlock._

               And Sherlock could still feel the orgasm that was building slowly in the base of his spine, the way he’d whimpered into John’s hair and the way the moment had been absolutely shattered when Lestrade had bounded into the room without bothering to knock.

               “Oh my god!” the inspector had barked, closing his eyes and stumbling back as if in actual pain. John had made an abortive attempt to move off Sherlock but the detective held him fast, murmuring in his ear about how the man was going to find out eventually and John was not going to make the situation any less embarrassing by flashing an erection that had previously been gliding along Sherlock’s naked hip.

               “This,” John said tightly, “is why doorbells were invented.” He settled himself against Sherlock in a way that would pass for a harmless cuddle were the two of them not utterly starkers.

“I never actually expected to find you two shagging.” Lestrade answered roughly, his ears flaming pink.

“Well, that’s an almost certain lie,” Sherlock countered, “Who won the pool then?”

The pool had been going on almost as long as John and Sherlock had been living together. Whoever won was going to be collecting a tidy sum of money.

Lestrade coughed in a weak attempt to stifle a laugh.

“No,” Sherlock growled, “You will tell no one of what you just barged in on.” He was not going to have his relationship benefitting _Donovan_ in any way. He explained as much to Lestrade. “I shall never help you on another case, _Greg._ ”

The inspector scoffed, “I’d like very much to see how long that lasted.” He knew full-well that Sherlock would be begging for a case within a week.

“Any other day.” Sherlock was serious.

“Fine,” Lestrade relented, “I’ll keep my mouth shut. Not really my place to tell anyone, anyway.” The man looked incredibly uncomfortable but he was holding up rather nicely for someone who wanted nothing more than to exit the flat and grind road salt into his eyes to scrub away the images of his two colleagues going at it. Which was completely ridiculous because it’s not as if he hadn’t known about Donovan and Anderson.

“Good,” John piped up; his chest flushed a lovely shade of mortification red, “lovely, excellent. Now can you please get out so I can get dressed?”

“Right!” Lestrade said, “I have a case I wanted to… I’ll just give you two… Just… I’ll be at the Yard when you’re… ready.” He practically tripped over his loafers in his haste to get out the door.

“Get dressed?” Sherlock asked, nuzzling into John’s neck and curling long fingers over the jut of his hip bone.

John had laughed, “Killed the mood a bit, love. Besides, The Work calls.”

He had always known how important the cases were to Sherlock and he was more than willing to shuffle aside and let the detective prioritize it above them. But Lestrade’s case was barely a three – Sherlock knew these things after so many years with the inspector – and he while he would always value The Work, Sherlock needed John to know that he no longer considered himself married to it. He’d considered himself married to John. Even two years before they made it official, John was the only lover he wanted.

They hadn’t gotten into Scotland Yard until nearly three hours later.  

 

Across the room, in another memory, a disappointingly less-naked version of the doctor and detective were having a row.

“We’ve fucking _talked_ about this!” John yelled, throwing his hands in the air.

“No, we didn’t.” Sherlock snarled, “ You talked. You knew how important those results were, why didn’t you just-”

“—Just, what, let you drink half an ounce of twenty percent formaldehyde dilution when even half of that has been known to kill adult humans?”

“I am a chemist, John. I know what I’m doing.”

“You’re an idiot, Sherlock, and I’m not going to watch you kill yourself to prove you’re clever.”

“No,” Sherlock fumed, “an _idiot_ would think I am going to trust anyone’s data but my own. This is my work, John, these are the risks. The _one_ area where I cannot have you slowing me down.” He picked up his bottle of CH 2O and made to march past his lover in a very clear dismissal.

Sherlock, looking back, could see exactly where the mistake had been. He had forgotten, in his stride, that John was very possibly the most terrifying person Sherlock had ever met. With Sherlock he was lumpy jumpers and tea and soft kisses to his collar bone and Chinese take away. To others he was a doctor who had once been a warrior. To people who made John Watson angry he was five and a half feet of steel nerves and iron grip. But to people who tried to hurt Sherlock, he was pain and possibly death. Even if that person was the man himself.

John grabbed his partner by the elbow and all but threw him against the book shelf, pinning him with a forearm to his chest. The solution was ripped from his hand and tossed with a tinkering crash into the fireplace. It was fortunate that the logs were not lit, else the fumes might actually have killed them.

“If you _ever_ try that bullshit again, I will knock you the fuck out and then I will call Mycroft. Don’t for one second think that I won’t. And I don’t care if you leave me for it. Because I did not sign up to stand here and watch you kill yourself. Not again.” He spoke quietly, his voice deadly calm and never wavering, “Not ever again. I did my share of watching you die, Sherlock. Remember that.”

Sherlock could remember thinking that he had never been more in love with John than in that moment.

 

The memories invaded every sense, but they were all old memories. There were none that Sherlock could time-stamp to less than eighteen months before his accident. He overturned a pile of post and his eyes fell onto a manila envelope.

Sherlock didn’t need to open it to know that they were papers to finalize his divorce. So… He and John were still technically married. They were dated for several weeks before he woke in the hospital. John must have had his mediator send them to 221B. They already had the doctor’s messy scrawl in all the appropriate places.

John had actually put signature to something that would make Sherlock not-his, and that was simply unacceptable. Sherlock felt absolute disdain well up in him; the kind that was usually only reserved for Mycroft and Anderson when either of them was doing anything particularly annoying. It wasn’t disdain at John so much as the stupid thing John had considered doing.

Sherlock decided, in the way that Sherlock decided just about everything, that this whole divorce thing was just rubbish. John loved him, the proof was incontrovertible and seeped into every crevice of 221B. The man had spent ten years with body parts and bullet holes and recreational poison. After ten years, what readjusting was there left to do? If John and Sherlock had not grown bored or resentful of one another by that point, why would they ever?

With that, Sherlock picked up the sheaf of legal papers and promptly disposed of them. The idea of not being married to John was repellant, and he resolved not to think of it again. He didn’t concern himself with his husband’s apparent willingness to sign their relationship away. John had been wrong; one of many things Sherlock had had to learn to overlook in their tenure.

He picked up his mobile and punched the numbers that would connect him to his preferred idiot.

“Sherlock?” _Voice: tentative. Expecting anger. Fidgeting, shuffling to a place more secluded than where he’d been. A pub—no. A restaurant?_

“You weren’t there today,” Sherlock said without preamble. “I was left in the dubious care of Mycroft.”

“I-” _a cough,_ “I didn’t reckon you’d be too thrilled to have me about, once you got home.”

“You mean because you filed to divorce me and you moved out and you let my horrible brother be the one to tell me?”

There was a heavy pause, “I take it being back in the flat didn’t jog your memory any, then.” The words were bitter, bitten off and spat back at the detective with the acid that spoke of a wound still far from healing. Sherlock winced.

“What do you mean?” Sherlock pressed, needing the answers that lurked just out of his reach. He needed to know what happened to make John leave him.

Another sigh. Weary, worn-down, it was the sigh that had been in the wake of a thousand arguments and it said _I am too tired and too raw to keep fighting with you, Sherlock. I am going to let you think you’ve won. But because every line of my face tells you and your massive fucking intellect that I am not actually alright, you will not derive any pleasure from my forfeit._ That sigh was manipulative, in the way which only terribly honest men could be manipulative. “Can we not do this now, Sherlock? I have to get back… I’ll try to call you later.”

Sherlock bristled at the dismissal. His life might have taken one unexpected and ridiculous turn outside his recollection, but John was still _married_ to him. “Screw calling,” he said, “Come home.”

“Sherlock…”

“Come _home_ , John.” He was not above using that voice which never failed to melt his lover into a puddle of compliance (in the bedroom or out of it). It was the voice of _I am not actually sorry that I put a severed hand and a mobile phone in the microwave together, but I shall feign contrition and you shall make me tea. Because you are perfect and you love me despite my madness._ It was more overtly and intentionally manipulative than John’s but Sherlock was not above manipulating his husband.

“I’ll stop by around seven o’clock _if I can._ ” Emphasis on the last three words were supposed to make Sherlock understand that John did not place him as his biggest priority any longer, and it might have been effective if John hadn’t spent five solid weeks attending to his ‘ex’ husband’s wounds nearly every day.

Sherlock gamely ignored it. “Seven it is, then. Be aware that you have over a year’s worth of explaining to do, and then we can discuss how to fix this tremendous mess.”

John hung up without a reply.

Sherlock spent the next several minutes cleaning away the shattered glass from his earlier (tantrum) loss of temper and replaced the skull on the mantelpiece. He slapped a nicotine patch on his arm (the nurses could not be threatened or cajoled into letting him have them and the bereavement had been like a constant burning under the skin) and considered that John’s departure

_Heleftmeheleftmeheleftme_

had rekindled Sherlock’s love affair with chain-smoking. His lungs probably looked like tar pits and John was going to insist on another tedious cancer screening.  His doctor had never liked the smoking, he’d tolerated the patches because – aside from raising the detective’s blood pressure to new and ever more dangerous heights, the negative side-effects were few.

               Which was not necessarily what John would say when he’d come home to find his husband sprawled on their bed with a row of patches up one arm and sheen of cold sweat on his brow as his heart thudded a wild staccato beat under his ribs.

               Sherlock wished for another patch, but the fragility of his marriage kept him relatively sober. Sherlock collapsed into his chair, tucked his feet under himself and tried (with no success whatsoever) to direct his churning thoughts away from those of John Watson.

               The flat looked worse than usual. Not that their home was necessarily a mess, they both managed to keep it under control, but a wounded Sherlock was the kind of animal that did not concern itself with tidying up, apparently. He’d clearly forbidden Mrs. Hudson any kind of cleaning  and a glance at the couch told him it was seeing use as a bed.

Sherlock didn’t need to look at his bedroom to know he did not sleep there anymore. _Sentiment._ John would probably be amazed at the detective’s overt gesture. Perhaps that would make it all better; perhaps when John walked in, Sherlock would walk his doctor through the flat and point out every sign, every cut and scratch and bruise on Sherlock’s heart where it was mapped in the furniture and John would forgive him for whatever he’d done to make John leave.

               Four hours, three patches, two actual cigarettes and a game of mental Sudoku later, the doorbell rang. Mrs. Hudson answered. They chatted very briefly. He mounted the stairs. Walked with tentative steps. Turned the knob. Paused. Opened the door.

Sherlock breathed. John always walked through the door like it was the first time, he never quite trusted what he’d find on the other side- what mad experiment Sherlock might be doing. Sherlock remembered every single step-handle-pause-turn-push. He recalled the last time he could remember John walking through that door.

 

 _(Hey, love_.) “Hello, Sherlock.”

 _(Good, you’re home. Did you bin the egg carton?)_ “John.”

               ( _The one full of moldering spider corpses? Yeah, that does not belong in the food pantry.)_ “You asked me to come, and here I am.”

               ( _That was an experiment!)_ “Yes, er… yes.”

               ( _No, it was traumatizing. Honestly, if you don’t want things binned, label them.)_ “You wanted to talk, Sherlock?”

               ( _Fine. Order Chinese?)_ “Seems like we should.”

               ( _Budge over, love.)_ “We broke up. Not really much to tell.”

               ( _Your hands are cold. Yes, exactly. Put your freezing hands under my shirt.)_ “How?”

               ( _I can think of better uses for your mouth than sarcasm right now, Sherlock.)_ “People just do, sometimes.”

 _(Well, you are a clever man, John.)_ “That’s not good enough.”

 

               John sighed heavily, rubbed his hands over his face and through his blonde-gray hair. Sherlock watched him as he looked around the flat, deduced his thoughts. John thought Sherlock had simply been too lazy to pick up after himself once John was gone.  He didn’t notice the new dips and grooves in the leather of the couch which told of Sherlock’s new sleeping arrangement. Sherlock observed how his eyes darted shyly over the door to their bedroom; he did not want to think of the long nights they had spent behind that door, learning the mechanics of one another.

“Would it help if I said I’m sorry?” he asked, standing from his chair and moving into John’s personal space.

“Not really,” the doctor answered, his voice rough. Sherlock took one of his hands and John did not pull away. He wrapped his long pale fingers around short, calloused ones and said, “You came to me in the hospital. You cared for me, even though I wasn’t your patient and you weren’t obligated. You love me, you’ve _always_ loved me. And despite… everything, you love me, still.”

John pulled his hand free and turned his body from Sherlock. His posture was closed, defensive. He didn’t want Sherlock to touch him, but Sherlock _needed_ to touch. To touch and hold and heal and keep because Sherlock was possessive and obsessive and unreasonable and did not respect boundaries.

“Loving you-” John spoke low and harsh, “ _loving_ you was never the problem, Sherlock.”

“Wasn’t enough to stop you from leaving, though, was it?” He didn’t mean for it to sound so terribly bitter. But the ache went too deep to be calm. It was too much, losing John was impossible.

“I…”

“I’m sorry, John. For whatever I said or did to make you leave me, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it and I take it back and I love you.” He put a hand on either side of the doctor’s face and pulled him in for a kiss. “I love you,” He kissed him until John finally opened up with a ragged sob and kissed back. He ran his fingers through soft blond-grey hair and cupped that beloved neck and dragged the smaller body into his-

“I didn’t leave you.” Whispered against his neck.

Sherlock pulled back, “What?”

John coughed, “I didn’t leave you, Sherlock.”

Of course he did. The evidence of the flat was inarguable. John no longer lived there. Ergo, John left him. Ergo, Sherlock did or said something to make John angry enough to leave him. Ergo, apologies and then forgiveness, and then sex and then moving John’s things back where they belonged.  Sherlock had it all mapped out. It should all have been settled back into order by noon the next day.

“Of course you did. But I’m sorry for making you angry and I forgive you for leaving and since I binned those rubbish divorce papers-”

“You _what_?!”

“Binned. Trashed. Disposed of. Did away with. They were ridiculous. I have no idea which one of us thought that would be funny, but it really wasn’t.”

John detached himself fully and turned to the trash. “Oh, don’t be stupid, John. I didn’t throw them in the trash.” Sherlock smirked, “I burned them. Seemed more poetic. Thought you’d like the touch.”

“You didn’t.” John’s tone did not suggest he was happy that the offending papers were no longer in the equation.

“Well, of course I did. Can you imagine what would happen if someone actually submitted those? We’d be divorced.” He shrugged, “they’re better off burned. Trust me.”

John looked absolutely livid. He took several very deliberate steps away from the detective and then took several very deep breaths. “Those weren’t a joke, you utter and complete bastard. Those were real. We are really getting divorced. We are really not a couple anymore. You had no fucking _right_ to burn those papers.”

“Why?” Sherlock fired back, “I said I was sorry. I have no idea what I did to make you leave, but I’m sorry. So why-”

“ _I didn’t fucking leave you, Sherlock!_ ”

“Well of course you did! Your clothes and books are gone. Your favorite tea mug is gone. Your laptop and movies and that ugly, sentimental picture frame is gone. _You left!”_

“You fucking kicked me out, Sherlock!” They were yelling and it felt so horribly familiar. The anger, the ache, the knowing how much they loved one another but having no way to bridge the anger and make it better. It all made Sherlock’s head swim with déjà vu.

“That’s impossible!”

“No.” John said, “It’s not. You told me to leave. You wanted the break-up and you asked for the divorce. Just because you can’t _remember_ that you stopped loving me doesn’t mean that you still _do_.”

“John…”

“No, Sherlock. _You_ left _me_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That pillar of salt joke was shamelessly stolen from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files.


	6. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm an awful person. Consider yourselves warned.

_John had proposed marriage on a summer morning, just as the first rays of sunshine were peeking through the bedroom curtains and casting Sherlock’s alabaster skin in a warm glow. They lay tangled in the sheets, the thrill of a solved case and a tender night leaving them boneless and content in the sanctity of their bed._

_“You’ve been considering asking me that for months, John.” Sherlock had said. “What made you decide to finally do it?”_

_“You say that as if I might not have done it.”_

_Sherlock had shrugged, “You might not have.”_

_“I would have. Am, in fact, doing it now.”_

_“You also considered I might be appalled at the idea of such a pedestrian ritual.”_

_John hadn’t been able to deny that. He had been afraid of Sherlock rejecting his idea of marriage completely. He’d said a thousand times; weddings were not his area, he had no interest in the silly things._

_“You’ve been carrying that thing around in your pocket every day since you bought it and you’ve probably imagined a hundred scenarios in that time as to how to do it –”_

_“And in every single one, you gave me an answer.”_

_Sherlock finally opened his eyes and blue eyes met hazel eyes in the luminescence of the rising sun, “In all of your scenarios, I said ‘no’. I rejected you. And you thought it would ruin our entire relationship if it came to light that you wanted to marry me and I wasn’t interested. You think that it would indicate an imbalance of regard. That it would somehow mean that I love you less than you love me. And that has been keeping you from asking me for at least three months. So I ask again, what changed?”_

_“Nothing,” John had admitted with a small smile, “but I figure I need to hear it for myself if crippling rejection is in my future.”_

_“Idiot.” Sherlock leaned across to his night table and opened the drawer. From it he produced a blue velvet box and tossed it onto his partner’s chest. “I realized when you came home the first night you’d considered it that you were going to have some stupid misconceptions that were going to drag it out as long as possible.”_

_He rolled over onto his knees, the sheet dropping away and leaving him naked and comfortable in his skin. He took the ring from the box and tugged gently on John’s hand until the doctor complied to let himself be led in this._

_“John, it was entirely foolish of you to put this off.” The detective reprimanded, “If you had even a shred of observational power, you’d know that we’ve been married since the day we met. How could you doubt that I am willing to say or sign or wear_ anything _that makes you as every bit mine as I am yours?” He slipped the ring onto his lover’s finger and kissed the pulse point of his wrist, “Completely and unequivocally yours.”_

_John pulled the ring he’d gotten Sherlock from its own box and slipped it around his partner’s finger, relieved that he’d gotten the measurement right. The doctor and detective lay in bed together, matching rings adorning fingers and stupid grins on lips that met frequently._

_“We should do it today,” Sherlock mused, “go and get a marriage license and sign it and be married.” He nuzzled his face into John’s collarbone and planted a kiss on the doctor’s neck._

_“We can go down and put in for the license, but we can’t actually get married today, love.” He kissed the top of Sherlock’s raven hair, “besides, I kind of want the whole thing.”_

_“You mean the suits and church and party and short sex holiday which leads to inevitably coming back and living together exactly as did before the whole affair?” There was an edge of scorn in his voice that had John pulling back, obviously wounded by his lover’s curt dismissal of the traditions of marriage._

_“I told you that weddings are not my area, John. People get married – and subsequently divorced – every day. The whole ritual is pointless. I will be legally and religiously, and publically yours and you will be mine and the same will be true without some tiresome ceremony.”_

_John had moved his partner off of him and sat up. He hadn’t looked angry, as Sherlock feared; he looked disappointed and more than a bit wounded. A second later, the look was gone from his eyes and a softer expression – entirely fake – was in its place. Somehow, it was worse than the very real disappointment._

_“So, no ceremony,” he’d nodded forcing a smile, “Okay. Just you and me and an officiate. Sounds good. I still want the sex holiday – which, by the way, is actually called a honeymoon.”_

_“You want a proper wedding.” It wasn’t a question._

_“No – well, yes. I mean. I guess I always just_ expected _a traditional wedding-”_

_“-Complete with a traditional bride.”_

_“It’s not important. If you want it quiet, we’ll do quiet. As long as it happens, I don’t care.”_

_“Except, you do.”_

_“Really, I don’t.”_

_“You do.”_

_“For Christ’s sake, Sherlock!” John was quick losing his temper, “Fine, yes. It’s important to me. I only intend to get married once in my life, and I intend for that person to be you, and I would love for it to be something you and I celebrate with the people in our lives. Our_ friends _– and don’t even pretend that they aren’t your friends too, you’ve known most of them longer than I have, and they love you. Do you think Mrs. Hudson would ever forgive us for getting married and_ not _inviting her?_

_“I want it to be a day I plan for and remember as more than something to cross off the checklist of my life.” He had placed a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, the anger draining as quickly as it had come, “I love you, Sherlock Holmes. I_ want _a traditional wedding, or as close to a traditional wedding as the two of us could get, but I also don’t want to make you do something you don’t want. If it’s important to you that we do quiet, we will do quiet.”_

_Sherlock had been struck anew with the fathomless depth of which he loved John Watson. He was_ less _without John. Had been less before he’d met him. Sherlock understood what some couples meant when one referred to the other as their ‘better half.’ John was more than just the half of him that was better; he was the piece of him which made everything else worthwhile. John Watson was his redeeming feature._

_He_ belonged _to the unassuming little Army Doctor; heart, body and soul- he was possessed. He couldn’t deny him this; this stupid ceremony that was meaningless to Sherlock but so very important to John. John would have it, he would have something planned to minute detail and perfect. People far inferior in intellect and design to Sherlock Holmes planned weddings all the time – Surely it wouldn’t be a chore for the world’s only Consulting Detective._

_“I only plan on getting married once, as well,” the detective said, “and I would rather like to see the look on Donovan’s face when she discovers that the man she most expects to be a serial killer actually married the man she most expected to be my first victim.”_

_“Yeah, well, she’s a useless bitch.” John and Sally saw eye-to-eye on nothing and the Sergeant’s part in Sherlock’s two-year absence from John had forever solidified her place in the doctor’s very short list of people he disliked without reservation. Molly’s opinion of her was no higher._

_(Three days after Sherlock had leapt to his faked death, Molly Hooper had  stormed into New Scotland Yard with a box stuffed with evidence and documents and lab results from their tireless work on those shoe scrapings during the_ Hansel and Gretel Case _as Molly called it._

_The mild-mannered ME had overturned it on Donovan’s desk and demanded to know which part of it had so baffled the officer that she had chosen to overlook it entirely and instead base her entire suspicions on the terrified screaming of a traumatized child as opposed to actual lab work.)_

_“Wait…” John’s eyes searched his face, barely daring to hope, “are you saying… I mean, you’re – you really… really?”_

_“Succinct as always, love.”_

_“Seriously, Sherlock. Really?”_

_“Yes.” The look of pure joy on the doctor’s face was enough for Sherlock to know he’d done the right thing. He’d given John something he really wanted. And, he realized, he was perfectly happy to do it._

_“I love you, you know.”_

_“Yes.”_

               “No.”

               “Sherlock…” John sighed, resignation warring with irritation written across his feeatures.  He leaned against the archway of the kitchen, arms folded stubbornly across his chest as he regarded his (ex) husband.

               “No.” The detective would not budge, “No. I couldn’t. I _couldn’t._ ”

               “I was there, Sherlock. I very clearly remember being told to leave.”  His voice was hard, but Sherlock saw the edges of strain in his expression. John was angry, he was hurt, but he loved Sherlock. He could not have hidden that from the detective, even if he wanted to. There was a well of emotions in John’s eyes; Sherlock read regret and anger and stress and guilt tampered with concern and a half-dozen other sentiments that had Sherlock’s guts twisting painfully.

               “You’re shaking,” John grabbed his elbow, stopping the detective as he made a dramatic whirl away from the doctor, “Will you sit down before you fall down? Christ.”

               “I take it back.”

               John’s brows creased almost together at the detective.

               Sherlock leveled him with an absolutely scathing look, “Don’t be stupid. John. It doesn’t suit you. I take back the breaking up. You said I did it, I’m undoing it. I take it back. As far as I know, it never happened. And so. It never happened.” 

               John sighed, his shoulders sagged and he looked so drawn that the detective wanted to drag him to bed and wrap himself around the smaller body until everything in the world disappeared but them.

               “It’s…” His voice cracked under the weight of his own hurt, “It’s not that simple, Sherlock. It’s not possible.”

               “Why not?” Sherlock demanded, “I love you. I know you love me. Any problems we had didn’t go any farther back than the past twelve months. Whatever happened before the accident, I don’t… I don’t _care_ about them! I care about right now. I said I’m sorry. I mean it. Can’t we just – fuck, I… - can’t we just go to bed and figure the rest out tomorrow?” He was babbling and possibly begging and he just didn’t have the energy to care. He would throw himself on the altar or dignity and offer himself up as willing sacrifice if it meant _never_ having to see another piece of paper on which John tried to sign himself out of their marriage.

               “Sherlock, I _can’t_!” the timbre of John’s voice told Sherlock that he was desperately trying to convey something to the detective that he couldn’t bring himself to actually give voice to.

               Sherlock looked at his doctor – really looked – for the first time.

               _John: unfamiliar soap, unfamiliar detergent, unfamiliar shampoo. John had moved out about a year ago, it was very unlikely he was kipping on a friend’s couch. But why on earth would he change the products he’d used since before Sherlock knew him?_

               The answer was so easy, so painfully obvious that Sherlock loathed himself a little for not spotting it the moment John had walked into the hospital room that first night.

               John wasn’t the one doing the shopping.

               _John: hair freshly trimmed. Shirt pressed, jeans worn but clean. He’d just come from some kind of social event. Lunch with friends, though not friends of his. People he’d been introduced to fairly recently. The tension in his spine and the cramping of his left hand said he had been bored. But, he’d stayed; loyalty and obligation were John’s life._

_And now it was loyalty and obligation to her._

One-point-five inch heels. Blonde hair. Large blue eyes and pretty features. Good height for John, shorter by a couple inches. And she had been uncomfortable in the room with Sherlock.

               “I guess I stated the wrong painfully obvious,” the detective growled, “I should have told her not to get involved with _my_ married man.”

               “Sherlock, don’t-”

               “How long?” Sherlock couldn’t quite keep the edge of menace from his voice, and couldn’t quite be arsed to care, “How long after _I_ left _you_ did you start fucking someone else?”

               Pain tightened the corners of John’s eyes, “four months.”

               Sherlock laughed harshly and looked around the flat, bright eyes taking in every detail because he couldn’t bear to look at John.  “You moved out ten months ago – calendar in the kitchen hasn’t changed since then. I never touch the thing, clearly you weren’t around to keep flipping the pages. There are messages scattered around the kitchen, Mrs. Hudson took them down because I clearly wasn’t answering my mobile – I recognize the number of the first few; Lestrade. His home phone number. The messages were from you, but the return number changed after about a month – you moved into a flat and were using the land-line. Why did you get a land line? No one has landlines anymore besides Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson.” He sneered, “You didn’t want me to know it was you calling. You thought I’d pick up the phone if I didn’t recognize the number. Of course, you couldn’t possibly know that I wasn’t taking any calls at the time – my mobile has an inbox full of texts to tell me that much.

               “And six months ago, you started sleeping with _Mary_. If you were still doing your own fucking laundry, I probably wouldn’t have been alerted to that particular aspect of your new life. But you switched soap and detergent. You never have, before. That suggests that you aren’t doing your own laundry, but rather letting someone else. You would hardly get it cleaned, why bother? Those horrible jumpers could survive much worse than spin cycle. Less than a fucking year after your eleven-year marriage ended, you get engaged to someone else.”

Sherlock met John’s eyes and for the first time in the years they knew each other, he very nearly hated him. “Tell me, John, how much _leaving you_ could I possibly have done? Clearly, you weren’t exactly shattered by it.”

John, who had stood rigid as a statue through the detective’s entire diatribe, jaw clenched and hands curled into painful fists, looked at Sherlock and nodded once before turning on his heel and walking towards the door. If there was a slight limp in his gait, he refused to acknowledge it.

“Where are you going?”

John huffed a completely mirthless laugh, “Home. Coming here was a bad idea. I – fuck. I should have known better.”

“You can’t just _leave_.” Sherlock made an aborted move to follow him when John whipped around.

“You are something else, Sherlock. You know that? You – god, it’s _so_ easy for you! You don’t remember those eight months before I finally left. Believe me when I tell you that leaving was best for _both_ of us.”

“John-”

“You put me through _hell_ , you mad fuck! What do you think could make me leave you, Sherlock? Really. I have been here through your absolute darkest days, I thought I had seen the worst of you, then.” His voice cracked, breaking an octave in a way that broke Sherlock’s heart, “I was very wrong. You were practically _abusive_ by the time I finally got out. You deconstructed us, and you…”

Sherlock stood, helpless and frozen as John trembled. Any other person but the doctor would be crying. John battled back the wetness in his eyes and it made Sherlock feel physically ill to see the pain etched deep in every part of his face.

“… you _enjoyed it_. You catalogued every word like some kind of experiment. You knew every button to press, every way to hurt me, and you used them. And the more you hurt me, the more _I_ wanted to make amends! How fucked up is that? You wouldn’t let me touch you for days and then you’d suddenly decide you fancied a shag and I was so desperate for some kind of affection that I didn’t even care that there was _no_ fucking affection in it! It was like a man I didn’t know was wearing the face of the man I loved and it was _killing me_ , Sherlock!” John ran trembling fingers through short blonde hair, his eyes wide and wild as he bore his broken heart to the man who didn’t have the decency to remember breaking it. “And then you’d come back, sometimes. In the middle of the night, and the lights were off, and it was too dark to feel anything, you’d be yourself again. God, Sherlock, I was so dependent on those handful of moments, every once in a while, that I stopped being able to sleep for fucking terror that I’d miss them.”

He sighed and stared at his shoes, “It was the worst year of my life.”

 

               _Better than anything they had ever dared to dream of. Sherlock and John had lain in bed together, wrapped so inextricably that they could almost believe they were one thing. It was the night after their wedding and Sherlock had thrown himself into the process with the kind of single-minded obsession he usually reserved only for level-nine cases and John’s body._

_“We’re married,” John said it with a kind of wonder, his lips brushing Sherlock’s collarbone._

_“You were right,” Sherlock had rumbled with his face half-buried in John’s hair, “this way was much better.”_

_There had been family and friends and drinking and dancing and food and wine and speeches and anecdotes and a waltz written by Sherlock for John that had resulted in possibly the first ever time in which the couple snogging in the coat closet was, in fact, the two who were just married._

_“I was told that I had to write vows,” Sherlock had said as he stood beside John at the altar, “I have never made a vow before in my life. Promises are far too easy to break and love is a vicious motivator and the combination of broken promises and love tend to lead to some fairly interesting murders, which is fun and all, but I’d prefer neither of us ended up on the inside of a locked room case…” Sherlock had looked up to find a church full of people eyeing him with expressions that ranged from amused to scandalized. John had been looking at him as if he were a miracle. Sherlock always wanted him to look at him like that._

_He cleared his throat awkwardly, “right. Yes. Anyway. John, I am not very good at loving people. My closest friends are barely more than colleagues. But John, I love you. And I promise that I am going to spend the rest of our lives finding out exactly what it means to do that- to love another person without reservation. And I will try not to let you down.”_

 

“You gave up,” John said, “you changed. And when I told you I was leaving, you said _‘then stop boring me, and go’._ So no, Sherlock, I can’t just forget about it. And I can’t come back. And I am not even sure I can forgive you.”

“John,” Sherlock whispered around the painful lump in his throat, “I – I don’t… John, How could I… John, please, I –” But he didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t feel his fingers and he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t about to be sick. How could he have ever hurt John like that? John Watson was every good thing Sherlock had never believed he deserved. He was the only warmth in a cold, indifferent world. Before John, Sherlock had been nothing more than parts; it took John to make Sherlock a whole person. If he could do that, if he was capable of causing such pain to the only thing in this world he truly valued, what was the point of him?

“You…” he licked his dry lips and gestured with a twitch of his fingers to John’s left hand, “you still wear your, your ring.”

The doctor’s fingers went instinctively to curl around the ring finger of his left hand, “I do,” he said. “I wear it to remind myself… what I had and what I lost. When the divorce is final, I’ll take it off and put it in a box, and never look at it again. Because looking at it will hurt. And I’ll never be able to forgive you if it still hurts..”

“John,” Sherlock rasped, his mouth dry and his throat painfully swollen with everything he didn’t know how to say. _John, I’m sorry. John, I love you. John, if you leave me, I’ll burn Baker Street around me. I’ll fill needle after needle until I can never feel anything again. I’ll…_

But John was leaving. He was hurt and he was angry and he was using some woman to try and put his life with Sherlock behind him. And Sherlock felt like he’d been dropped in a nightmare mirror of his life and he hated that other version of himself with every fiber of his being. He wanted to rip that man who had caused John so much pain to shreds.

Sherlock grasped John around the elbow, tugging him back against his chest, “don’t go.” His heart gave an involuntary flutter at the contact, and no matter what he did, he just couldn’t stop himself from reveling in the feeling of the smaller man against him.

He leaned down and the tip of his nose brushed the blonde-gray hair behind John’s ear, “John, _Please_.”

 

_“Please,” Sherlock rasped, begging and beyond caring. John pressed a hot, open-mouthed kiss to his husband’s collar bone as heat sparked beep behind his pelvic bone. Sweat beaded down his spine as he grasped Sherlock’s knee and dragged it up, changing the angle and pushing in again. They shuddered in tandem, close to the edge and chasing the pleasure of each other._

_It had been the first night of their ‘sex holiday,’ as Sherlock had tactlessly referred to it. Mycroft had sent the new couple to the Seychelles for two weeks as his wedding gift to them. Sherlock hadn’t understood the point of wedding gifts and John had told him to stop talking before thanking his brother-in-law (and wasn’t that just weird) sincerely._

_“I love you, I love you,” John growled as Sherlock thrashed under him, every nerve singing as he barreled toward the brink of orgasm, feeling as if his heart was going to leap from his chest and burrow itself in beside his partner’s._

_John had taken him apart for hours, hands and mouth tracing every inch of skin as he relearned Sherlock Holmes. Not as friend or boyfriend or fiancé, but as husband._

_As the inexorable other half of him._

_As the legally documented love of his fucking life._

_“Always,” Sherlock had keened, long fingers buried in his short blond hair, “always.” He’d come with a muffled sob, eyes leaking from the sheer intensity of their connection. He’d felt broken and restored and drained and sated and torn up and whole._

_John had followed him over the brink and slumped on Sherlock’s chest, breathing hot and hard on his lover’s neck. “Holy… shit.” He’d nuzzled the detective’s damp skin and gathered the taller man in his arms, never wanting to move again. “Tell me you’ve never felt like this with anyone but me.”_

_Sherlock was practically purring as he wrapped a knee around John’s hips and kissed the top of his hair, “no one else,” he murmured, “before or ever again. No one.”_

“No, Sherlock.” He untangled himself from Sherlock’s arms and took an unsteady step away. “I can’t do that.” He gathered himself, wrapping his tattered pride around his pain and soldiering on like the good captain.

               “No, John, just. Stop.” It was not a reasonable thing to say, but John was leaving and maybe forever. Sherlock felt an old itch under his skin, the amber-eyes of a dangerous ex-lover who wanted to be in his arms again. She called to him, enticed him, and John was his only hope. Fidelity. He wouldn’t cheat on John with a needle, no matter what harsh threats he’d issued in the distant past.

               “I don’t – I _can’t_ discuss this with you, Sherlock. Please, I can’t. I didn’t get lucky enough to forget.” He buried himself deeper into his light coat, “I have to go, and I _want_ to go. I have a life with Mary and...” He sighed, “Sherlock, I know you don’t remember. I can’t imagine what this must be like for you, and I’m sorry. I truly am. I know you’re in pain, and I wish that I could change that, but I can’t come back. Please, Sherlock. Please?” His eyes pled, “Just let me go.”

               The scent of John’s unfamiliar shampoo stayed with Sherlock long after he’d gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.


	7. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter this time 'round, friends.   
> Thanks to all the awesome people who have left comments and kudos. Without you, this would never get finished.   
> New chapter next week :)

               John had known it was only a matter of time. From the moment Sherlock (bloody, fucking Sherlock Holmes) had opened his stupid fucking eyes in the hospital with eighteen months conveniently missing from his memory, John had been counting the days before his ex-lover would want the kind of answers that John just couldn’t give.

               John stormed away from Baker Street on foot, his thoughts roiling around in his head and his guts twisting in a dangerous kind of anger. The kind that had once gotten him placed under arrest for punching the chief of police. He wasn’t paying the slightest mind to his surroundings or direction. He needed to get the fuck away, and he needed to do it as soon as possible.

               It was his own weakness which disgusted him the most. Sherlock had put him through Hell, had torn down everything they’d spent years building with child-like glee. He had broken John’s heart so thoroughly that the doctor wasn’t even sure he was capable of loving Mary the way she deserved – the way he so desperately wanted to. She had been a salve for the wounds, her smiles were stitches and her warm hands were tourniquets for the parts of him that were beyond saving.

               It had been wretched guilt which had him in the hospital that night, but he couldn’t pretend that it was guilt which had kept him there. Love had kept him going back to Sherlock’s side, slipping seamlessly back into the role of lover and doctor and friend which had become so impossibly foreign. He’d known it couldn’t last, he’d known that he was setting himself up to reopen every single hurt.

               And still, when Sherlock had looked at him with the kind of open, warm affection he had not shown in such a painfully long time, John had been powerless against him. Powerless against the broken promises he kept wrapped around his finger like armor against his own heart:

_Whatever words I say, I will always love you._

               What John had once considered a shockingly sentimental and attentive gesture on Sherlock’s part (not only did he actually pick up on that song as his favorite of The Cure, but had incorporated those lines into the bedrock of their marriage), was now barbed wire every time it played on the radio.

               What a fucking joke. Sherlock Holmes was not a man of sentiment, no matter what John had fooled himself into thinking for such a depressingly long time. He could turn it off and on again the same as his tears. Emotions were playthings to Sherlock, and so was John. Just a toy for half and a decade of distraction and physical gratification and a decent lab assistant.

               No – that wasn’t fair. What they’d had was real; it had been a thousand-thousand moments that were etched into their skin and the walls of 221B. Sherlock had loved him, and John was a coward for trying (not for the first time) to tell himself otherwise.

               And that was what hurt so badly; What he and Sherlock had had was the kind of once-in-a-generation relationship that most people spent their whole lives looking for.  Then why had it been so easy to tear apart? Why had Sherlock tossed him aside for that _fucker_ …

               No, John breathed deep through his nose as he walked away from Baker Street, he wasn’t going to go back to that. He wasn’t going to think about that smarmy, posh putz who Sherlock had…

               No.

               How? How did his heart still want Sherlock? After everything he’d done and all the pain he’d caused?  

               John was so immersed in his own thoughts that he registered a second too late the black car which had glided silently up beside him, keeping a slow pace with his angry trudge. John growled, fucking Mycroft. Naturally. One Holmes bullies their way back into his life and the other is soon to follow.

               Fuck.

               “Hello, John.” Smug bastard in an impeccable suit with an expression on his face like he was patiently weathering the sum total of the world’s stupidity with good humor. Mycroft Holmes had never changed. There had been a time when John and Mycroft had gotten on fine – well, even. They were brothers-in-law, united in their determination to protect the man who was most important to both of them.

               John thought Mycroft blamed him for how bad Sherlock had gotten after the break-up. He’d gleaned through Molly and Greg that the detective had become an absolute raving nightmare; he wasn’t just short with people anymore; he actively reduced them to tears. He yelled at Molly, publicly shredded Anderson and had driven at least four officers out of homicide. And that had been only the very first case since John had moved out. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten any better in the months that followed.

               Greg had kicked him off more scenes that he’d invited him onto and it was apparently Sherlock’s need for puzzles which had kept him accepting clients at all.

               The man was, according to everyone who wasn’t Sherlock, an absolute wreck.

               “Goodbye, Mycroft.” John rejoined, not bothering to break his stride. If Mycroft wanted a word with John, he could make a bloody appointment with the clinic. John might even be able to surgically remove the stick from his governmental ass.

               “Get in, Dr. Watson.”

               “Fuck off.”

               “Get in the car, John. _Now._ ” It was the tone of a man who could and would make very bad things happen to those who crossed him. With a growl, the Army Doctor threw himself into the luxury car and glared across the leather interior at his former brother-in-law.

               “What the bloody fuck do you want, Mycroft?”

               Mycroft sat, umbrella across his lap, and surveyed John with clinical interest. Outside the darkened windows, London passed in silence.

               After several tense minutes, Mycroft spoke. “The very first time I saw you and my brother together, over the CCTV cameras as you investigated your ‘Study in Pink’ case, I had the impression that you had a power that I was not comfortable with any one person having. You could be the making of Sherlock… or, you could make him worse than he ever was before.”

               John resolutely said nothing.

               “Granted,” Mycroft continued almost conversationally, “I didn’t really expect you two to fall in love and get married, despite what I said upon our first conversation. I rather expected him to show off for you and for you to follow him into danger and for the two of you to be disastrously bad influences on each other until I was called in to identify a pair of bodies. I expected you to get my brother killed. And I didn’t like it.”

               “Well, it’s not the first time you’ve been wrong, Mycroft.”

               Mycroft acknowledged his words with a small, indulgent smile, “indeed.”

               “I know my brother’s mind, John,” he went on, “I know how he justifies things to himself. My brother fell in love, real love, for the first time. And his love was absolutely obsessive – and the object of that obsession was you. And then you two broke up and his animosity towards you was absolutely obsessive. No matter what position you hold in his life, one thing is constant – you, John Watson, are the first and last thing he thinks about. What might we deduce about his heart?”

                “I don’t care.” John snapped at the older Holmes, “Jesus, Mycroft, Sherlock can’t remember anything, and he’s a mess. I don’t know what the hell to do, and –”

               “And yet,” Mycroft continued as if John had not spoken, “the moment it was made clear that he was unaware of the rather spectacular sequence of falling out you two had, you were right back in his bed.” He rolled his eyes, “gurney, rather. Which is a very circular chain of events, given the circumstances.”

               John searched Mycroft’s face as realization dawned and dread pooled in his stomach like lead, “You don’t want to tell him.”  

               Mycroft didn’t blink, “correct.”

               John swallowed over the painful, sand-paper lump in the back of his throat, “Mycroft, he has the right to know.”

               The elder Holmes sighed and it wasn’t the condescending sigh of a man who was living in a world of goldfish. It was the sigh of a man who was tired and worn down and worried.

               “Sherlock loves you more than anything in this world. He loves you more than you have any understanding of. He loves you so much, it almost destroyed you both. And that was _before_ he woke up without his memory.” His fingers tightened on the hilt of his umbrella, “How do you think he’ll take the knowledge that you nearly killed him?”


	8. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SS Plot is underway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for all the comments and kudos. I adore and owe a debt of gratitude to every single one of you. 
> 
> Update next week, 
> 
> Ink

            Sherlock sat cross-legged on the living room floor at 221B with his laptop propped on his knees and his back to the seat of John’s chair. He’d watched as John had torn away from the flat on foot from his vantage point at the window with a painful lump in his throat as John had gone from view.

            And then he’d scooped his laptop from the coffee table and wrenched it open and gone straight to John’s months-dormant blog. It didn’t look different, same green border and off-white background. But seeing how many months had passed since John had catalogued their adventures further drove home Sherlock’s misery. Not nearly so much as John’s final missive, however;

           

The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson

“Blog Suspended”

No. I don’t want to talk about it. If Sherlock does, bully for him.

The blog is done because _we_ are done.

 

            It was dated for November of the previous year; the month after Sherlock deduced John had abandoned Baker Street. Sherlock moved on to the second-to-last entry:

 

“Algernon”

I want it on record that I am strongly against this. I told himself that I was strongly against this. He didn’t listen.

So, I imagine you’ve all seen the news lately; the drug that people are calling Algernon. It started showing up at public schools and then started showing up everywhere. It improves focus, memory, and reasoning in its users; it makes them absolutely brilliant.

It makes them Sherlock.

For about a fortnight.

The human brain is a magnificent and delicate thing. Believe me, I married the most magnificent brain on the planet. But the human brain does have limits. For example, it needs rest. Algernon runs the brain too hot, too hard and for too long. Users stop sleeping – which rests the brain (Yes, Sherlock, it does. I can prove it. I’m a bloody doctor. Either go to med school or stop arguing with me) – And they stop eating, which nourishes the brain.

Jesus, it really does turn them into Sherlock.

After about six days of that, their brains start to deteriorate and after eleven to thirteen days, of course, the victims burn out completely and die.

Sherlock and I were called in to help with the case.

Well Sherlock couldn’t find the answer. He’s a brilliant chemist, but there was some kind of signature he was trying to find, some way the drugs were brewed up that make them do that to the human mind.

So… he called in help. And the ‘help’ is what I’m strongly averse to. 

Sherlock insisted that he needed another set of eyes for the project – another chemist who specialized in theoretical formulas.

You remember that smarmy dick we did the stalker case for?

Sherlock decided that we needed his help.

And help he did. He ‘helped’ us destroy a lab sample, he ‘helped’ us not save a fourteen year old girl’s life, and he ‘helped’ himself to my partner of eleven bloody years.

His price for assisting on the lab work (for what turned out to be a laughably loose definition of ‘assisting’) was a date with Sherlock.

I’m not being a jealous ass; that was the actual word he used.

To make what it turning into a rant a shorter story, Chem didn’t actually prove to be of much use at all. Thanks to Molly’s incredibly hard work with one of the victims, she managed to secure us enough evidence for an arrest warrant, and it looks like the case is closed. Hopefully, that’s the last we’ll see of that horrible, destructive poison.

Oh, and the Algernon drug.

 

            Sherlock’s interest was piqued with the information about the drug, but he was loathe to think of any chemist he’d be willing to work with (and fewer who would be willing to work with him) who might prove to be beneficial in that situation. There wasn’t a single name on that list, in fact. There was Molly, and that was it.

            The detective had a very hard time believing that he’d meet a college professor (especially one whom John seemed to dislike with such a passion) who might have so impressed Sherlock that he’d be willing to risk his lover’s anger by working with him.

            And the date… Sherlock was not above using people to achieve his own ends. He could wear charm like a mantle, provided he didn’t have to wear it for long. He was perfectly capable of feigning affability and even flirtation for the three hours it would take to manipulate someone over a restaurant table.

            But he wouldn’t – he absolutely wouldn’t – risk John’s displeasure in order to do it.

 

“Happy Anniversary, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Madman”

I was looking through this blog last night, and it’s so amazing to me, now, that there was ever a time I thought of my life as dull.

I was invalided home from Afghanistan when I was thirty five after I got shot in the field. I thought it was the end of my life.

And then I met Sherlock Holmes. He was arrogant, petulant, indecently pleased about a string of serial suicides in the papers, looks about twelve years old, and was (is) the single most magnificent person I’d ever met.

We flat-shared for a year and a half. The most incredible eighteen months of my life until that point. He became my best friend and not just the other half of all my best stories, but the star of them.

I’d never loved another person so much.

Not that I’d realized it at the time. I have a string of angry ex-girlfriends who will attest to my as-of-yet unrecognized feelings for Sherlock Holmes.

And then the fucker died.

He got into a pissing contest with Jim Moriarty and jumped off a building to save people he cared about from being shot by hired goons.

You all remember this from my old posts, I don’t need to go into detail.

Well, following the best year and a half of my life was two years of the walking wounded. I was… everything… I died with him.

I still can’t really talk about it. He was gone, and nothing mattered. I didn’t matter. The only important thing was that Sherlock never lied to me, not until the very end. He left me with a stupid, stupid lie. I hated him for it.

And then he wasn’t dead anymore. He came back to me.

I punched him in the nose.

Sherlock loved me. He chose me over his career, his reputation and his own life. He told me those lies and he made me watch him commit fake-suicide because he loved me.

People think he’s a machine; unfeeling. But that isn’t true. He never has been.

A year after he came back, we got married.

We’ve been married for ten years, today. We’ve been together for over twelve. I’ve loved him for.

Sherlock, I never expected this to be my life. If you’d asked me the day before I met you that I’d spend the rest of my life with someone who uses the toaster to test burning methods on bits of skin, I’d have laughed at you.

But I wouldn’t want anything else.

And yes, I know what you say about sentiment and I probably have to turn in my Proper British Male card, but it’s the only first-ten-years anniversary we’re ever going to have.

I love you.

So much.

 

            Sherlock shoved the computer off of him, stomped through the kitchen to his months-untouched bedroom and yanked John’s stale pillow off the bed. He crushed it to his chest, breathed deep the faintest scent of John’s _real_ shampoo, and bit down hard on the fabric case as hard, hurt noises tore themselves from his throat.

            It hurt, oh _Christ_ it ached through every part of him.

            His head was pounding and he fought the urge to curl up in their bed. It was too cold in there without John. Instead, he carried the pillow with him back out the door, careful not to disturb any other part of the bedroom as he went. He had to go down to Mrs. Hudson for the pain medication that the hospital had given him; normally, they would have just given it to John and they both could have pretended to overlook the awkward reality of Sherlock’s past.

            Sherlock as a cocaine addict. He was over a decade from his last fix, but addicts never recovered – not really. Before he’d woken up in this post-John life, he’d thought he’d never want the stuff again. The high was fleeting and he knew that one time, just one, would have been enough to push John away.

            There was no question which of the two he needed more.

            Nevertheless, hospitals were still wary of giving a bottle of lortab to someone with such a severely addictive personality as Sherlock’s. He knew that Mycroft had played a hand in that, and as much as he resented his older brother, Sherlock could understand the concern.

            It was tempting, so tempting, to try and numb the ache in his chest with chemicals. It was a phantom hurt, a psychosomatic manifestation of sentiment.

            But god, it felt like he was drowning.

            “Come in, dear.” Mrs. Hudson opened the door to her surrogate son and patted his arm sympathetically all the way to her couch. She sat him down, shoved a cup of tea into his hands and placed a single pill in his palm. She clucked and fretted over him the whole time and Sherlock would never say it, but he was grateful for the comfort.

            As the painkiller started working its way through him, he tipped his head back and finally asked, “How much of that did you hear?”

            “All of it, dear. The walls are terribly thin.”

            “Is it true?”

            Mrs. Hudson pushed his mop of dark hair back from his forehead, “yes, love.”

            “I left him.”

            “In a manner of speaking. He walked out and you didn’t stop him. Tsk, Sherlock, I could just slap you both. The way you used to talk to each other, the awful things you’d say. I don’t blame him for leaving, mind. I also don’t blame you for not going after him, by the time he did.”

            “What happened to us?” Sherlock asked, the pain in his head wrapped in a thick chemical wool and his skin deliciously numb as it brushed across the fabric upholstery upon which he sat.

            “I’m not the person to answer that for you, Sherlock.” She took his empty tea cup, “What I can tell you is that you loved him, and he loved you, and I don’t pretend to know why or how you two managed to lose your way, but by the time he walked out, it was killing you both to be around each other.”

            “So, I should just let him go?”

            Mrs. Hudson patted his hand warmly, “Of course not, dear. You two need each other. Just because you lost your way doesn’t mean that you’re better off apart.”

            “He’s engaged. To a woman.”

            “He’s already married. To you.”

            They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes more. Finally, an idea struck Sherlock. A question risen from John’s blogpost. He looked at his landlady, who sat companionably by his side and he asked her, “John’s blog mentions a chemist whose assistance I sought with a drugs case. He didn’t mention a name, however; would you happen to know?”

            Mrs. Hudson’s lips pressed into a line, her expression turning dark. “That _man_. I told you he was bad company, Sherlock. Your ‘old friend’ had quite a bit more on his mind than friendship, dear.”

            “I don’t have any old friends,” Sherlock replied, “Especially not… any…”

            The detective sprang off the couch and bolted back up the stairs without another word. He dropped to his knees on the living room carpet and practically tore open the lid of his computer, his fingers skating over the keys as he dug through John’s blog, hoping that this once, just this once, he was wrong.

 

“Sympathy for the Devil”

Met Sherlock’s ex last night. We took a case that he refused to explain to me before we left the flat (big change, there) and when I found myself in a university chemistry lab standing between Sherlock and a man who looked at me like I was the man standing between him and Sherlock.

I promised that I wouldn’t put his name in the blog, and I’ll honor that. I’m not sure what to call him as “that smarmy fucking git” is much longer than his actual name. So I’m just going to call him Chem (because he’s bloody toxic), and hope that’ll be good enough for His Nibs.

Chem, apparently, was Sherlock’s teacher at uni. Like any sensible person, Chem realized that Sherlock is brilliant and mad and amazing and apparently the sentiment was once returned. Once. Apparently it ended badly. Apparently, Sherlock ended it. And apparently Chem didn’t exactly agree with his decision.

Chem didn’t make much of a secret of disliking me. Which, okay- you get the boot from a man like Sherlock and then find out twenty years later that he’s gone and married himself some entirely average Army Doctor and GP and Greater London reads about our adventures on this blog. Bit of a kick in the ego. He actually told Sherlock to leave me. Right in front of me! Sherlock wouldn’t let me hit him.

Anyway, Chem had a stalker. The difference between Chem’s obsession with my husband and his stalker’s obsession with him was that one of these men was creepy, overbearing, vaguely threatening, thoroughly annoying and a complete arsehole. The other, of course, was a stalker.

Chem recruited Sherlock and me to help him uncover the identity of his admirer and stop him before things got too out-of-hand. Sherlock did his Sherlock thing; he was an unstoppable force of rapid-fire deductions and I was dragged in his wake through what felt like the whole bloody campus. I didn’t mind, he was magnificent.

I want to think that him upping his game was all for me but I think he was feeling insecure about his old… friend (this is like Wilkes all over again. Another arsehole) and I think he wanted to be extra amazing.

We ended up solving the case of Chem’s Stalker. A boy in one of his advanced classes who had decided he wanted to be Chem’s – er- “star pupil”. Chem had rejected his advances (who says people can’t change?) and the boy had not taken it well.

Sherlock was disappointed in how blindingly obvious it had been and I have my suspicions. Chem’s a pretty smart bloke; I don’t think he _needed_ the World’s Only Consulting Detective for this so much as wanting to reconnect with Sherlock.

I deeply regret not punching him.

The things I (refrain from) do(ing) for love.

 

            Sherlock dropped his head into his hands, as blind, impotent panic shot through his stomach. On its heels followed white-hot rage.

            Stefan James.

            Obvious. Stupid. Stupid. Childish. Elementary. Foolish. Arrogant. Stupid.

            Impossible.

            Mycroft would have had Stefan killed before he let him within two miles of his younger brother. A stipulation upon which most of Sherlock’s post-university freedom had depended was that he and Stefan never again made contact. It was one of the few sensible things the British Government had ever said.

            Stefan had been a jumping-off point in Sherlock’s life. A very bad time, and worth more than the man’s life if John had had any idea of his involvement in the addiction which plagued the consulting detective.

            He’d not seen nor spoken to the man since he was nineteen years old. Stefan James was a locked room in his Mind Palace that he’d hidden away the key to. He was a teenage boy’ first hot kisses and shame. He was quicksilver agony and white relief. He was sixteen days in a sterile white room with Mycroft’s parting words on a loop in a broken young man’s brain _you upset mummy._ Stefan James was a Hell that wove itself around a lonely genius boy when that boy was too young and stupid and desperate to be loved to know that he was being devoured alive.

            Sherlock would never have let John Watson in the same mile radius as Stefan James.

            He…

            He had, though.

            Hadn’t he.

 

            The email had been short. It was more a missive than a letter; deceptive.

_Will,_

_I imagine this must be a surprise. I know that calling up an old… friend… for help is a bit of a cliché, but you always were my best and brightest. I understand you’ve made a career of private investigating, also, which is actually why I’m writing._

_I think I may be out of my depth. I have a minor situation at the university - I’m being… well, I supposed you could say that I’m being stalked. I’ve received several threatening messages, and my car was broken into last night. I only know that the culprit is a student. I would rather resolve this quietly; As you know, I have my fair share of karmic debt to repay and I would rather find a peaceful resolution that potentially ruin a young man’s life._

_I could use your assistance before things escalate._

_You know where I’ll be. Nothing’s changed._

_Hope to see you within the day,_

_Stef._

            It had taken the space of ten lines for Sherlock Holmes to go from being happy, successful (for a given definition), married consulting detective of forty-six to a nineteen-year-old college student, obsessed with his chemistry professor.

            It took the space of ten lines for never-quite-healed wounds to split open, raw and fresh and painful as his young-self walked away from the first and most destructive relationship he’d ever had.

            Stefan had carved a piece for himself out of William Sherlock Scott Holmes. Molded it with gifted hands into a lovely mutilation of the young genius.  Walking away from Stefan had been the hardest thing Sherlock had ever done, and it had nearly cost him his life. 

            Sherlock hadn’t thought of Stefan James is over twenty years.

            He had locked that all up but the scars remained; the ghost of memories had been with him the first time he’d kissed John. The first time they’d made love. The day they were married. Ephemeral wisps of memory had brushed the surface of his mind at those moments, an old ache that Sherlock would not allow himself to name.

            And now, as then, was there a hand to brush them away, to dispel the ghostly tendrils of rage and hurt and needle-sharp cravings.  One steady hand which landed on Sherlock’s shoulder and wiped regret away. Small fingers, blunt nails, pale hair, calloused palms, gentle touch.

Doctor’s hand.

Soldier’s hand.

John’s hand.

            “You alright, love?” Concern. Affection. Lazy adoration that came most heavily after long nights without cases in which Sherlock directed the frenzied energy of his deductions onto every inch of his husband’s body.

            Sherlock loved him so much. More in that moment than most because John pulled him back from every edge. He closed the e-mail, ready to delete the information when, from the depths of zipped files in his internal hardrive, Sherlock remembered the last thing Stefan had ever said to him after the young detective had told him that he was leaving him.

            _Who would ever love you but me?_

            It was the same stupid, illogical schoolboy hurt which had driven Sherlock to take the case for Sebastian Wilkes more than nine years previous. The detective had wanted to prove that he could, in fact, have friends. That someone in the world actually liked him. Now, he wanted to prove that someone in the world actually loved him; the real him with all his faults and fractures and craziness and cruelty. John Watson loved him as Sherlock Holmes, not as a constructed concept, molded with a manipulative hand into a willing victim.

            It was John – contrary and unassuming and ruthless and compassionate – who had saved his life. John had found a man for whom emotions were unbearable and he’d torn down the walls which made Sherlock cold and alone. With laughter and bullets, John had saved an unsalvageable man.

            And that was enough to be going on with. Stefan didn’t scare him and Stefan was no threat to them. Sherlock loved John and if an old acquaintance wanted to hire their skills as detective and doctor, he was more than willing to take the case.

            But that was all he’d be taking from Stefan James.

            He wasn’t a child anymore. And he wasn’t an addict.

            “We have a case, John.” Sherlock closed the lid of his computer and stood, straightening his suit jacket before reaching for the comforting weight of his Belstaff.  John, dressed in faded jeans, work boots, a tee shirt and his old brown leather jacket (The one Sherlock absolutely loved because John looked incredibly hot in it, but would never admit to loving because John would then wear it all the time and get hit on and then fight with Sherlock about his reaction to John getting hit on), grinned and asked where to.

            John. Gorgeous, open-faced Captain Watson with his expressive blue eyes and soft lips. Over a decade later, Sherlock was as in love with him as the moment they’d met. He’d been honest when he’d told the doctor, that first night at Angelo’s, when he’d said he wasn’t looking for a relationship. He hadn’t been. But he had been… something. Something he couldn’t have put a name to if he’d tried. How could Sherlock Holmes have known that what he was feeling had been _need_?

            Need for John, for his smiles and praise and criticism and annoyance? Need to impress him and infuriate him until death do they part? William Sherlock Scott Holmes had never needed a thing before in his life, even his addictions were more a matter of intense want than actual need. But then this short, scarred, wounded man had staggered in and changed Sherlock’s DNA until every molecule was stamped with JHW.

            And now Sherlock was going to bring the one thing he needed in his life to the one person who had nearly destroyed him. And all to prove a point.

            Even he could see what a tremendously stupid thing he was about to do. But John would ground him; keep him focused and strong and sane. Keep him clean.

Keep him Sherlock.

The detective pushed his way into his husband’s personal space and pinched the half-done zipper between his thumb and forefinger as the other hand wrapped around the base of John’s neck and threaded into his short blonde hair, “I love this jacket,” He muttered against the smaller man’s lips, “I’ve never said, though. You don’t even have to flip up the collar to look cool.”

            “I’ve always known you liked this jacket,” John replied, hands on Sherlock’s hips, “but if I wear it all the time and then you’ll go and be an utter berk to anyone who dares compliment it.”

            “You know me too well.”

            “Better than you know yourself, love.”

            Sherlock Holmes pressed John Watson against the closed door to their flat and kissed him, slow and deep as his mind raced and reeled. Some deep, dark part of him remembered fuller, firmer lips that dominated his and large hands that ran roughshod over the planes of his young body. He remembered needle-point affection and powder-white obedience. He kissed his lifeline and thought of sweet, rough, ecstatic death.

            The siren song of Stefan James.


	9. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft is meddling again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This barely counts as a chapter. I am just furthering the plot in a ham-fisted kinda way. 
> 
> A proper chapter will be posted within the nest few days!!
> 
> Ink

Mycroft Holmes loved his brother.

            Sherlock refused to believe it; he saw his older brother as meddlesome, over-bearing, controlling and officious. He was correct on all points, but that didn’t change the fact that Mycroft Holmes loved his little brother.

            They were two of a kind; their father didn’t understand them and their mother was too busy to devote any real time to either of her sons. So Mycroft had given himself to the task of being his brother’s keeper. It was maybe not always a task he excelled at; Sherlock had always been prone to self-destructive behavior and it only increased as he got older and wilder and more and more intelligent.

            He was like the East Wind to Mycroft; a force of nature. A massive potential for disaster.

             From the time he was seven years old and his parents came home from the hospital with a blue-swaddled baby in their arms, Mycroft had done his limited best to protect the little boy he loved. 

            John Watson didn’t wait for the car in which they both sat to come to a full stop before he had the door opened and was barreling out into the bustling streets of London proper. His shoulders were low- his whole small body dragged low with the weight of his own greif – and a barely perceptible limp which favored the psychosomatic limp in his right leg every second step he took.

            Mycroft watched him go and he felt like a failure. He wanted to hate John for what he’d done to Sherlock – for the ways he’d made the younger Holmes weak and vulnerable. Caring was not an advantage. Sentiment were the blocks with which a man could build his own hell. John had made Sherlock’s walls crumble; he’d left the wild boy vulnerable.

            But… John had also kept Sherlock clean and healthy and happy. He’d made Sherlock eat almost regularly, he made him smile. He made that sullen brat laugh and _love_. There weren’t words for the debt which Mycroft owed John by virtue of sharing the weight of loving Sherlock.

            John had nearly killed Sherlock – it was a mistake, an accident, a miscalculation, a loss of control… It was an unforgivable thing. It was a punishable offense.

            John would never forgive himself.

            Mycroft merely added it to the list of ways in which John put Sherlock in danger. John Watson was an ever-evolving cost-risk analysis.

            Sherlock had nearly killed John – it was deliberate, cruel, a game, a carefully controlled experiment… It was also an unforgivable thing. It had been a punishable offense.

            It was a cruel symbiosis, and Mycroft allowed himself a single human moment to close his eyes and wish that he could make things easier for them both. He cared about John, he considered the man family.

            But Sherlock would never forgive him if he intervened now. And he probably wouldn’t forgive himself if any more harm came to either of them than the petty brises they left on each other.

            Mycroft pulled a small black notebook from his breast pocket, opened it past government codes and world-changing secrets to a page with a single word written in the sharp scrawl of Sherlock’s hand –

_Nemesis_


	10. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Misty water-colored memories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a heel. After I promised I wouldn't do this kinda shit to you guys again, I went off the grid for three months. 
> 
> I moved, I got a new job, my boyfriend broke up with me because he's having a mid-youth crisis and I'm trying to stitch our tattered relationship back together, and for a while there, I was just too messed up to write a love story while my own seemed to be crumbling at my feet. But the show must go on, and part of being the better version of myself is not giving up. I made you lovely people a promise, and I intend to keep it. 
> 
> Love,  
> Ink

_John and Sherlock didn’t talk about Sherlock’s “death”. They never really discussed the two years he’d left John to grieve his best friend’s suicide in the hollows of London. They didn’t count them, the many months that stretched like a gaping wound in their shared story. Sherlock had been clean for barely more than a year when he’d met John at twenty-seven._

_John had forgiven him for so much; the act, the lie, the unconscionable betrayal of leaving the doctor to grieve for so long. But John had never quite forgiven Sherlock for the_ wasted time _. For taking two precious years away from them, like he’d been sticking a bookmark in a novel._

_The first time they’d ever slept together, Sherlock had been back for three weeks. Twenty one miserable days Sherlock had spent nursing both a black eye and a cold shoulder from John. When he’d shown up at the restaurant and crashed John’s date with the pretty redhead woman in the lavender dress, he’d had every intention of saying the things he’d painstakingly rehearsed every day since he’d stepped off St. Bart’s._

_“You let me grieve,” John ground out in a ragged, harsh half-whisper, “How could you do that?”_

I had to protect you _, He’d intended to reply,_ John, I couldn’t let you die.

_What he’d actually said was, “Mrs. Hudson was right, you know. It ages you.” He’d known the second the nervous laugh had slipped through his lips that it was the wrong thing to say._

_John had said nothing else to him after that; not for three damned weeks. Not ever again, Sherlock had worried._

_It had been one disastrous night, two or three weeks after John had made his position inescapably clear, that Sherlock was curled up in his (John’s) chair and pretending to himself like he could still almost smell his friend’s shampoo and skin beneath the musty layers of time._

_It was nearing three in the morning and Sherlock was practically vibrating with the need for nicotine and mental stimulation. He couldn’t sleep, he didn’t want food, the flat was too quiet without the tiny, negligible noises of padding feet and deep breathing and shared life in 221B. After so long away, after the things he’d done and the things he’d never thought he’d do… Sherlock wasn’t going to find peace in dreams._

_What he wanted was a case. Lestrade had taken Sherlock’s resurrection shockingly well. “Ooh, you_ bastard _,” he’d muttered around the butt of a cigarette before surprising the Consulting Detective with a tight embrace. Sherlock had hugged back awkwardly and tried not to feel relief at having at least one person he considered a friend be happy to see him._

_Lestrade didn’t have any work for him. Getting Sherlock back inside the police tape wasn’t going to be easy and while Anderson might have gone a little mad in the interim and somehow decided Sherlock was a good man, Donovan was hell bent for leather to lock him out. Even in the face of her own misjudgment, she was still convinced he was nothing but a time bomb ticking to zero._

_What Sherlock was refusing to want was John. John Watson with his bright eyes and horrible jumpers and military gait and blonde hair and stupid, stupid smile. He told himself a hundred times a day that he didn’t want John. Didn’t need him or miss him. Didn’t ache at the very thought of him._

_It didn’t work._

_Sherlock wanted to resent him, wanted to tell him that after everything Sherlock had done to keep him safe, John had no right to be mad. John was alive and whole and around to be angry because Sherlock had given up_ everything _– his career, his reputation, his life, his very soul – to keep him that way._

_And every time he thought that, he remembered the look on John’s face the second before he stepped of Bart’s roof, and how the doctor had stood at his grave and refused to cry and begged him not to be dead, and the way he’d looked the moment their eyes met at the restaurant when John had looked… small. Small and as broken as Sherlock felt._

_Sherlock was setting himself up for a good long sulk over it all when the unmistakable sound of small feet treading the stairs had him up and across the room in an instant. He wasn’t about to let John see him curled up in a chair, breathing in the last shred of his flat mate that he had._

John – tee shirt rumpled, jeans creased from hours spent discarded on the bedroom floor before being hastily tugged on (left pocked inside-out), gray-blonde hair stuck up at all angles (restless sleep), shoes untied – laces dragged in mud.

_“I’m not dead,” Sherlock assured, aiming for conversational._

_“Nope,” John said in that cheerful way which was not at all cheerful. When John was annoyed, he frowned. When he was angry, he grimaced and clenched his jaw. When John Watson was incandescently furious and spoiling for a fight… he smiled. His voice went light and dangerous. He was the opposite of Captain Watson, who was forever controlled and contained in the small man with the steady hands. Furious John was half-feral and gleeful; his voice trembled and his hands shook and he was a force to be reckoned with._

_“You had a nightmare. You woke up, threw your clothes on, and came here. The nature of the nightmare isn’t hard to determine. What’s-Her-Name broke up with you… three days ago. She thinks… who cares what she thinks.”_ She thinks that now I’m back, you don’t want her. She thinks she had to compete with a ghost, and it was awful. She can’t compete with the real thing. You could go back to her, tell her we’re not like that. Tell her you don’t want me like that. So, why don’t you? _“Rest assured, I’m alive. You can go back to sleep now.”_

_“No, I can’t.”_

I know, John. I know you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in longer than you can remember. I know that it is only sheer bloody-mindedness which keeps you off a cane. I know you hate to cry and never did it when anyone could see you, kept it confined to beneath the showerhead. I know you told your therapist that your best friend was dead and nearly choked on the words. I know, John. Please, stop hurting. I’m right in front of you.

_“I haven’t slept in months. Every time I close my eyes, you die. And it’s only gotten worse since you came back.” He looked at the floor before abruptly raising his head to glare into Sherlock’s eyes, “Why did you come back?”_

You. I came back for you. I came back because you needed me. Because you asked for a miracle. I came back because I need you, too. I came back for Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade and even Molly. I came back because –

               _“London is home.”_

_John nodded, “Yeah. Yeah, of course.”_

_Sherlock took a tentative step forward, “John…”_

_“Nope. No. Sherlock, you don’t… You can’t expect that you can just come back from the_ dead _and that I’ll just forgive you for it.”_

_“Why not?” Sherlock honestly didn’t understand. He was alive, he’d apologized, he’d come back. After everything, he’d still come back for John. He’d given him what he wanted – for Sherlock to be alive. Why couldn’t John just accept it?_

_John’s face did something very close to crumpling and his small shoulders sagged. He looked older and smaller and more tired than the detective had ever seen him and it made something in Sherlock’s chest ache fiercely._

_“Every night…” John clenched his jaw shut and a crease appeared between his blonde brows, “I kill him every night. But no matter how fast I am or how well I aim or whatever I do, I am never fast enough to save you.” He opened his eyes and glared at his friend, “You didn’t just die once, Sherlock. You’ve died every single time I’ve closed my eyes in two years. One word… One word is all I would have needed. I note slipped under the door, a fucking signal from one of the_ hundred or so tramps _who got to know that you were alive when I didn’t.”_

_“I’ve almost been in contact so many times,” Sherlock said, taking a sudden interest in his socks._

_“But you_ weren’t _, Sherlock. You never called. You never fucking wrote. You let me believe, for two years, that I had watched you die. That I had been too slow and gullible and stupid to save you. That I lost you.” He took a breath, “I_ failed _you.”_

 _“I love you.” Sherlock was saying the words before he’d considered the consequences. John might punch him. Might yell at him or might even walk away and never come back. So, he kept talking, hoping desperately that if he said enough words the right way, John might not do any of those things. “I couldn’t let you die. Moriarty had a gun to your head and it was my life or yours. And I chose yours. Because… because there is nothing I won’t do, no way I won’t hurt you if it means keeping you here and alive and_ safe _. I can sink to unimaginable depths, John, to do what I feel needs to be done. And I don’t care if you hate me, so long as you’re in the world to do so.”_

_John stood in stunned silence for a very long second and Sherlock actually allowed himself to hope._

_“You… son of a bitch.”_

_Amazing, Sherlock reflected as John grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him bodily into a wall, how a few words had the power to gut him completely._

_“You can’t say that to me,” John growled, “You made me watch you die. You_ made me watch _! You don’t. You don’t do that to people you love. You. You. You can’t just… You. You left me kneeling in your blood wishing it had been me instead. You let me stand over an empty coffin and beg for your life. And now you think you have any right to tell me that you love me? Just. Don’t.”_

_The grip on Sherlock’s shirt slackened and John pulled away,_

_“I’m sorry.” Sherlock didn’t know what else to say. The rejection was obvious and painful. He’d told John he loved him and John had pointedly not returned the sentiment. Had told him not to say it again. Had said all the words that mean,_ I don’t love you back. _Sherlock wanted to let his heart break, but he didn’t want to do it in front of John. He didn’t want John to feel guilty for not loving him back. Fleetingly, Sherlock almost wished he really had died._

_“But you’d do it again, wouldn’t you?” The anger that had abated flared up once more with a vengeance, “If you thought you had to. Instead of trusting me, instead of trusting anyone, you’d just say that alone protects you and jump off another fucking building.”_

_“Would knowing I was alive have made it easier?” Sherlock snapped, tampering his guilt with anger and righteous indignation, “Would it have been easier on you knowing that I was alive and off in Serbia getting chained to a wall and beaten to a bloody mess until my older brother had to go in and drag me out have made it easier for you?”_

_“No,” John shot back, “Would knowing how many times I came close to eating a bullet have made it harder for you?”_

_Sherlock felt as if he’d been slapped. He tried to fit that sentence into any corner of his mind, and it rejected at every point._

John- John, dead. John sitting slumped over in a chair with a half-empty bottle of whiskey and a centimeter-round hole in his soft palate, the wall and floor behind him splattered with rust-colored blood and gray matter. John – cold and blue on a slab at St. Bart’s, y-incision running down his chest and his doctor organs being carefully removed and donated for transplants.  John- long-buried and rotting away under the cold English earth beside Sherlock’s empty coffin. No. Nononono.

_“…Sherlock. Sherlock, stop. Come on, breathe, dammit!” Sherlock didn’t realize he was hyperventilating or that he’d wrapped his long fingers around John’s biceps and was holding on in a white-knuckled grip that was absolutely sure to leave bruises._

_He flipped them around and pushed John against the wall, covering the smaller man with his whole body and leaning his forehead down to John’s, effectively trapping the doctor. “You can’t die, John. You can’t. I won’t allow it. I would hunt, to the ends of the Earth, anyone who tried to hurt you. Even if it’s you. If you’d done anything… If I’d come home to your corpse…” He squeezed his eyes closed and felt John’s heartbeat against his chest._

_John put his hands tentatively on Sherlock’s waist, “Doesn’t feel very good from the other side, does it?”_

_“It’s not the same at all.”_

_“How the hell so?”_

_“You lost a friend, John. You didn’t –”_ You didn’t lose your heart. You didn’t lose the only thing you’ve ever loved in this stupid, boring world. You didn’t –

_“It’s exactly the same, you daft prick.” John insisted, “I don’t want to be here if you aren’t. I kept thinking that death would bore you; no cases, no tea. I thought maybe you were just stuck in vast, quiet darkness and bored out of your mind. And so I thought about doing what I have always done – following you.”_

_“Why?” Sherlock pleaded, “You were free. You could have found a wife, had children, gotten out of GP and gone where you were supposed to go, which is A &E. Mycroft assured me he was going to be paying you an extortionate amount of money to sew his agents back together! I left you a life, John.”          _

_“Not much of one.” John said, “Mycroft offered me the job and I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to see all those people and know that I could save them and not you. I’ve tried dating and they all tell me that it’s like trying to touch a ghost. Laura, the one you popped in on the night you came back, told me that it was wrong of me to try and offer her a broken heart. She said she’d done enough competing with your ghost, she wasn’t about to test her mettle against flesh and blood.”_

_“So you were just going to kill yourself?!”_

_“Hey, which of us started that fucking trend?”_

_“I wasn’t really dead, John!”_

_“How the hell was I to know that, Sherlock?”_

_“And here we go again!” Sherlock shouted, pushing himself off of John and twirling dramatically, “We could talk circles around this conversation all night!”_

_“Good!” John shouted back, “After two fucking years of_ nothing _let’s just scream at each other all night!”_

_“You should have come with me the night I came back!”_

_“You should never have left!”_

_“You would have_ died _, John!”_

 _“I thought_ you _were_ dead _, Sherlock!”_

_“What do you want me to say?” The detective demanded, “What can I possibly say that will make it better? What was I supposed to do? I had no choices. I had no time. I had a gun to the head of the only person I ever –”_

_“I wanted to kiss you.” John interrupted abruptly, “When we were at Bart’s that last time. You said you didn’t care, and I was so angry with you. I called you a machine, but I wanted to grab you by that ridiculous suit jacket and breathe some goddamned life into you. I wanted to prove to you that you cared, that you were human, and that you could feel just the same as me. And when you walked into that restaurant, I wanted to kiss you again.”_

_Sherlock didn’t dare breathe. He didn’t blink. His mind whirred back to that moment before John had stomped out of Bart’s for the last time and couldn’t quite fit what John had said into the frame of how that afternoon had gone. If John had done it, if he’d stomped across that lab and pressed his perfect pale lips to Sherlock’s…_

He’d be dead, now, _the detective pointed out with vicious pragmatism._ You would have been weak and stupid and you’d have made the wrong choices, and your treacherous body would have cost John his life.

 _Still, hearing John say he wanted Sherlock…_ He knows I love him, now. Is this revenge? I want to kiss you, too. I want you to have all the bits of me than no one else ever wanted. I want you to love me without changing my name. I want more than I ever got from – _Sherlock locked the rest of his thoughts away. Long-buried hurt was not going to make fresh wounds sting any less. He refused to think about it._  

_“I. I want…”_

_John wasn’t letting him out of this the easy way._

_“You told me I couldn’t say it.” Sherlock didn’t really know how to circumvent ‘don’t tell me you love me’ with ‘I just desperately want you to never kiss anyone but me for the rest of your life.’_

_“You have never listened before at any time when I told you to shut up.”_

_“This is different.”_

_“It’s really not. Or did you miss the part where I love you, too?”_

_That… That was not at all what Sherlock expected him to say. “What?”_

_“You know, for a genius, you can be remarkably thick,” John observed as he pinched the fabric of Sherlock’s shirt, “I’m furious with you, I think you’re an unmitigated shit, but I love you. I sort of want to punch your teeth out, but I love you. You’re an absolute bastard with no hint of consideration. But… I love you.”_

_“John,” Sherlock growled, “I swear, if you’re just trying to get a bit of your own back…”_

_“Stop being an idiot, Sherlock. Why do you think I haven’t had a decent relationship since we met? Why do you think I didn’t move on and get married when you were dead? Why do you think I’m so bloody angry with you? Friends get over this sort of thing.” John looked like every word was costing him a bit of his pride, he was almost as bad at voicing sentiment as Sherlock himself, “Family doesn’t. You’re my family, Sherlock. And I love you.”_

_“Like a brother.” Sherlock concluded dully, “You love me like a brother.”_

_“No.”_

_And that, Sherlock decided, was enough to be getting on with._

_John pressed his lips to Sherlock’s and the world might have genuinely ended. Something in the detective certainly broke. Some last tattered wall that the detective hid those last few precious secrets that he had not already given to the doctor crumbled to so much dust at his feet. He uttered a small cry and gave himself utterly to this simple act of intimacy._

_It took the doctor about two minutes to realize that Sherlock had never been fully intimate with anyone before, let alone another man and it took Sherlock about eleven-point-two seconds to realize that John had._

_“Not gay?” Sherlock cast dubious eyes at the pulse pounding under John’s skin, rattling under arms and torso which were actually rather gorgeously sculpted for a man of his height and age. He was flat and toned and solid and Sherlock felt like a strip of aluminum trapped in the pull of a particularly strong magnet._

_John smirked, “Not gay. Not straight, but not gay. It makes me uncomfortable and more than a bit pissed off when people try to invalidate how I feel about women because I happen to feel the same way about men.”_

_“But not the reverse?”_

_“Yeah, the reverse. But I’m more selective about what blokes I take to bed. It’s less common for me; I think I’m a two on the Kinsey Scale. I am more generally attracted to women, but I form deeper bonds with men.” John calmly unbuttoned and divested Sherlock of his shirt, exposing the detective’s own skin for hungry scrutinizing._

_“You’re…”_

_Sherlock, for a horrified moment, thought that John was going to say something ruinous like ‘beautiful’ or ‘gorgeous’ or, worst of them all, ‘mine.’ He knew how people saw him when they didn’t know him; he used it, occasionally, to get information from this or that person. They saw his blue-green-gold eyes (heterochromia iridis) his pale skin, his dark curls, his sharp cheekbones and broad shoulders. They saw what he wanted them to see – a handsome man in a tailored suit._

_Sherlock hated being called beautiful. He’d had enough of being told that there were better uses for his perfect mouth than talking while he was still in public school. He knew it was stupid to cringe from what otherwise might be a compliment, but admiration for his physical form – neglected though he usually kept it – was secondary to his mind in every imaginable way. If there was anyone in the world whom he relied on to care more about what came out of his mouth than the shape of it, that person was John H. Watson._

_“Scarred.”_

_Sherlock could have kissed him._

_In fact, he did._

_When the broke apart, John stared at the expanse of Sherlock’s chest with a doctor’s eye. Sherlock hadn’t come out of his hunt for Moriarty with the same creamy English skin he’d gone into it with. He’d eaten more and slept more and did just as much running and even more fighting in that year than he’d done before in his life. He’d gone up two suit sizes in pure muscle and gotten a bit of a tan, which had all but faded since being home._

_But Sherlock hadn’t always been able to run. Sometimes, he’d been caught. Or sometimes, he had to be caught in order to better infiltrate the operation. Sherlock had done more killing that year than John may have ever done in his whole military career. And the scars showed every word of the story._

_“You should never have gone alone,” The sound John made was livid. He pressed calloused fingers to Sherlock’s abdomen and glared right through the scars, “I should have been there to stop this.”_

_“It wasn’t as bad as all that,” Sherlock began but was silenced by a look from his friend._

_“This is a beating, Sherlock,” John spat, “and more than one. I’ve seen marks like this on POWs, on corpses. That one was from a knife-” he ran his finger over a wretched, jagged scar over Sherlock’s hip. “This one… they burned you. With… cigarettes. Crude but effective. Rope burn scar I never noticed on the side of your right wrist. You were tied up for days, weren’t you?” His fingers were shaking as they roved over Sherlock’s body, fury burning in the smaller man like a beacon. If Sherlock hadn’t felt so tremendously exposed in that moment, he would have been deeply impressed with John’s power of observation._

_“I lived.” Sherlock said, feeling exposed and defensive, “I lived. I came home to you. I came back. I’m right here. I’m here and I would really love it if you would stop examining me like a bloody patient and assessing my wounds. They healed, and I was around for them to heal. Corpses don’t scar.”_

_He took the hand that had settled over his sternum and kissed its fingers, tip-by-tip. “Please, John,” He placed the borrowed hand on the curve of his neck and shoulder, “Let it go.”_

_He kissed John, then. Kissed him with everything he had, for whatever he was worth. He felt like an exposed nerve and he had no control over himself or his rampant emotions. He let John lead him to his bedroom, let John strip him of clothing and bare his skin and his soul. He let John in in ways he’d never even let anyone close before._

_For a fleeting second, Sherlock’s perfect memory supplied him with words and touches from the long-buried past. He pushed them aside, not about to have his happiness stolen by old ghosts. He buried his fingers in John’s short blonde hair, cradling his head and slotted himself in so that every possible inch was touching._

_For such a small man, John seemed to go on forever. No matter where Sherlock touched, there always seemed to be another square inch of undiscovered skin._

_“Sherlock, Christ, slow down. I’m not going anywhere.”_

_John never lied to Sherlock, But Sherlock had lied to John. Sherlock said John was the first—and partly, that was true. John was the very first person Sherlock had ever let past every defense. John was the first person John had ever loved so deeply, he became an extension of the man himself._

_But John was not the first person who had ever touched him. Was not the first person who had held the power to break Sherlock’s heart. He wasn’t the first person Sherlock had ever loved._

_And the first one had nearly killed him._

_Twice, respectively._


	11. Chapter Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> PLOOOOOOOT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two in a week, because it was already on my computer, and because I love you guys.

Mary wasn’t home when John got back to their flat. He retrieved their mail from the box and carried it into the kitchen where a note from his fiancé was stuck to the refrigerator.

 

               _John,_ it read, _Sheryl’s gone into labor early. I probably won’t be back the rest of the night. I’d have called, but my mobile met tragic, watery ends and if you need to reach me, phone Ellen. I hope you got the answers you were looking for today, love. I hope you can put this behind you, now. I love you and I’ll see you tomorrow._

_Mary_

_PS; Did you get him to sign the papers, yet?_

 

               Bloody hell, the papers. When Mary found out, she was going to have a fit. He couldn’t believe Sherlock would just go and burn them! No, that wasn’t true. Of course Sherlock would just go and burn them. Why on earth wouldn’t he?

               Sherlock had once tried to blow torch a letter from an overzealous fan named Mary Russell who said she would be a much more suitable companion than Dr. Watson.  She’d sent him stories of the pair of them in which he took her on as an apprentice and he, so impressed with her deductive prowess, fell in love with and married her.

               John had found it absolutely hilarious and Sherlock had been far from amused.

               The doctor had come home from the surgery one afternoon to find his husband bent over the kitchen sink with a blowtorch in one hand and a bottle of lighter fluid in the other, smoke billowing through 221B.

               The boys had had to replace the sink and Mrs. Hudson had been absolutely hopping mad, but John found himself grinning foolishly at the memory as he recalled the look of triumph on Sherlock’s face as the last of Mary Russell’s girlish fantasies smoldered to blackness.

               Being back in his old home had hurt fiercely. Standing amongst all those memories, every touch and kiss and laugh that had slipped into the walls and every screaming match and ugly word which hung in the air and stained their former happiness had been like a knife in John’s guts.

               He’d wanted to scream at the detective. Wanted to shake him and demand to know _why_.

_You loved me so much, Sherlock. You love me right now! You can’t fake that, you always fucking loved me. So why?_

No.

He wasn’t going down that road again, that way led to madness. He’d been over those questions a thousand times over the past year and a half. He’d sobbed them, drunkenly, into Greg and Molly’s couch cushions after he’d finally decided he’d had enough. He’d asked them again with sunken eyes and a hollow voice when Mary finally managed to coax him into talking about it while they transitioned from friends to lovers.

John ran agitated fingers through his blonde-gray hair and switched the tea kettle on. It was a long fucking day and John Watson was going to sit down, have a brew and not think about Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t going to think about how part of him had wanted to laugh when Sherlock said he’d torched the divorce papers because it was such a blatantly Sherlock thing to do. He wasn’t going to think about the way it made him feel when his ex said to him, “can’t we just go to bed and figure the rest out tomorrow?”

It was so bloody tempting. John could just imagine curling himself around his partner and breathing him in one more time. He could imagine shuffling under their covers and entwining his legs with Sherlock’s. He could imagine that simple, intimate act of sharing a bed and he wanted it so badly it stung.

Sherlock had left him, and Sherlock had hurt him and Sherlock couldn’t just waltz back in with a brain injury and expect the damage to be undone because he couldn’t remember it! The son of a bitch seriously thought that because he didn’t recall it happening that the screaming matches and the fights and the bitter, shameful way they fell into sex with each other as a result was suddenly all better.

Well, it wasn’t all better! John didn’t suddenly unfeel every time Sherlock had brushed him away when he tried to bridge the ever-widening gap between them with a kiss or a touch. He didn’t suddenly unhear the harsh, spiteful things his ex-lover had called him in the heat of yet another argument which Sherlock always seemed to instigate.

               Nothing was undone by Sherlock’s amnesia but the fact that John was suddenly carrying those things alone. And that last fight… John only hoped that if one memory could stay lost, it was of that night. John hated himself for what had happened, but he mostly just didn’t want Sherlock to rediscover the depths of darkness to which he could sink if he really put his mind to it. John had been furious before that night, but he’d never wanted to truly hurt the detective before. He’d never hated him before.

               That last fight had changed everything. It had been the last nail in the coffin and the reason why John – even if Sherlock never recovered from his memory loss – could never go back to him.

 

***

 

               Sherlock was not a sentimental man. Despite the ever-mounting evidence to the contrary, Sherlock Holmes did not spend his time pining for lost love and obsessing over the drugs that were not in his system. John was Sherlock’s first lover, but certainly not his only. The Work had shared their bed.

               It was The Work which comforted him now. After the flash of insight which came from remembering Stefan’s e-mail, Sherlock’s memories were a swirling void of black and nothingness.

               It was frustrating. Sherlock dug his fingers into his scalp as he paced the length of the living room and back as if he could pry the answers out through his hair. John thought that Sherlock and Stefan “obviously weren’t done” and yet the very thought of his old teacher made his insides boil with a rage he’d never really experienced when they’d been together those decades ago.

               His guts seemed to remember more than his brain did and if spitting, aching hatred was what he felt for Stefan James, why would John think it was attraction? Or… love?

So. He and John had helped Stefan James stop a stalker; Sherlock wanted to laugh at that. It was so transparent – Stefan had never shied away from having sex with his students. He’d had boys before Sherlock and he’d had boys during Sherlock and he’d had boys after Sherlock. The professor always had some trite apology or explanation ( _“They don’t mean anything to me, Will”… “You can hardly fault me for needing what I can’t get from you”… “I fuck them, Will, but I love you”… “I am going to fuck you so hard you forget where you live, and I’ll never even think of another man again. Until then, I’ll have sex with whomsoever I please. You want all of me, then I want all of you.”_ )

Sherlock, even at eighteen, had never trusted him enough to actually give him that much control over him. How could Stefan have expected trust when he was guiding a needle into his very young lover’s arm?

               Sherlock was fairly certain he’d never told John that. If John had been standing in the same room as the man who had introduced Sherlock to the drugs which had nearly robbed his husband of life two times and was a constant sword of Damocles hanging over their happiness, Stefan would not have left that room alive. 

               So, if he could not remember. He would deduce.

               ***

               The setting: University.  Second floor chemistry lab. Second door on the left hand side.

               The players: Doctor John Watson, captain of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, in his sexy brown leather jacket. Sherlock Holmes, the world’s only Consulting Detective in his Belstaff. And Doctor Stefan James, Head of the Chemistry and Theoretical Sciences Department, the way that Sherlock remembered him from nearly twenty years before; chestnut brown hair, bright green eyes, and the kind of handsome, angular face that movie stars envied. Button-down shirt tucked into expensive trousers and rolled to the elbows. Black and white Converse brand trainers artfully faded along the seams and yet rigorously maintained free of scuffmarks and tread-wear.

               

               Sherlock had been seventeen, a sophomore in university, several years younger than the students around him. His peers hated him; older boys like Sebastian Wilkes had treated him like some kind of party favor – what he could do, his “trick”, was amusing so long as it wasn’t being pointed at any of them. Girls were worse – they jealously guarded their secrets and resented Sherlock for his ability to see past their coy smiles and shaded eyes.

               It hadn’t been until his second year, when he’d managed to bully the school board into letting him take the interesting classes (under the condition that he take one truly horrific Literature class) that he’d met Professor James. And Stefan had been… different. He wasn’t pedantic and self-important and insecure like every other person in the place; he was confident and interesting and clever. Terribly clever.

               ***

               Sherlock practically growled, this wasn’t helping. He wanted to deduce his interaction with Stefan James based on John’s blog and his own knowledge of the people involved. Not take a treacherous trip down memory lane. That way led to madness, and Sherlock needed to fix his marriage and stop his lover from marrying some fucking woman with sensible shoes and blonde hair and the ability to give him the much argued-over children he so earnestly wanted.

               ( _There are options, Sherlock._

_Like what, John? Adoption? Surrogate? Who do you think would ever give a child to an army doctor with severe PTSD and a recovering drug addict, diagnosed as a sociopath?_

_So, we don’t even bother trying?”_

_John, think about our lives. Where exactly would a child fit into a midnight rooftop chase or a back ally brawl? Who would even consent to letting us look at a child after finding out how we live?_

_I like to think we’d both have our priorities in the right place and put our child first._

_Not likely._

_I want kids, love. I always have. I can’t just magic that want away._

_Then you should have married a woman and had kids. Maybe a picket fence and a nice economy car. The life you chose with me doesn’t accommodate any of that. The work is paramount. It comes before us and it certainly comes before imaginary children.)_

John had gone to bed alone that night, Sherlock hadn’t thought about – hadn’t really cared about – how much his blatant and offhand dismissal of something John wanted so badly might hurt him. He’d been being rational, he told himself. Their life… no kid could live like that. Ignored for the work, having one parent resent it for the confinement. John liked to believe that Sherlock could place another person before himself and give that person the love they needed. But the only person he was capable of truly loving was John.

               Ugh, off track again! Why couldn’t he focus? His head throbbed right over his left eye and he was exhausted. He really just needed John to come home and make things better.

                              But John wasn’t coming home. Not until Sherlock could figure out why.

               ***

              

The Scene: Sherlock and John walking down the hallowed halls of Sherlock’s personal coming-of-age morality play. John- confident strides unconcerned, uninformed, unprepared. Sherlock – a mask of neutrality, unyielding under the pressure of a long-covered heartbreak. He could do this. He could do this if he had John. He was not a child anymore. He was not an addict ( _notanaddictnotanaddict. JohnJohnJohn._ ).

               The doors: plain wooden barriers with circular windows at eye-level with the detective. He’d had his last growth spurt at seventeen and maintained a six-foot stature through his entire adult life, despite the oft-commented idea that he would be taller ( _“an allusion maintained by virtue of a good coat and a short friend”_ ). Sherlock  stopped outside the second door on the left hand side and took a breath. Not something John would have overlooked. He would have asked if the detective was okay, concerned etched on his kind face.

               Sherlock would not have talked about it. Sherlock would have pretended not to listen and would have shouldered into the chemistry lab in a flourish of Belstaff and determination. He would have taken in the negligible alterations to the lab since his time there:  _retiled floors – exact same color and pattern, same half dozen ugly wooden-top tables fixed into the floor in two rows of three, whiteboard replaced by one of those smart boards. Sherlock’s seat, front row, on the right in the isle, with nearly two decades of new scuffs and scratches and burns from careless students._

               The moment: Stefan, sat behind his desk and grading papers ( _His desk, where Sherlock pressed his lips to Stefan’s and disappeared. William rose as a phoenix from the cast-off bits of him that Stefan didn’t want. The worthless bits. The pieces that were not lovable – No, stop. John loved them. John loved him for every word and wound and tattered scrap of pride that he shrouded himself in like armor made of aloofness and sarcasm. John. John loved him. Not worthless. Not worthless)_. He looked up as the consulting couple crossed the threshold, and his green eyes crinkled at the corners, emphasizing crows-feet that had not been there before.

               His chestnut hair was streaked with gray, his skin fractionally less firm it had once been. He wore age with grace – he was still devastating to look at. Still gorgeous. And he still fucking knew it.

               Seeing him again was like a wrecking ball to the chest. Sherlock didn’t need to deduce that; he knew it. Those lips which had once owned him, those hands which had once and many times run rough and possessive over his barely-matured young body, those eyes which had watched him fall apart time and again from the skillful ministrations of his hands and lips and teeth. Sherlock might have actually stopped breathing.

               Sherlock might have wanted a hit.

               “I don’t believe it,” Stefan would have said, “William Holmes. Has it really been nineteen years?”

               “William?” John might have scoffed, aware of his husband’s distaste for the name.

               “Sherlock,” the detective would have amended in the same wary way he’d told Sebastian ‘it’s not a trick’ back during the case of the Blind Banker… a lifetime ago.

               Stefan might have turned his attention to John, who would have been every bit as impassive in the face of Stefan James as he was in the face of the British Government. He’d have stared down Sherlock’s old teacher without a thought to what he used to be as Stefan sized him up with a smile that did not reach his eyes.

               “Doctor Watson,” Stefan would have held out his hand, “I’ve read every entry of your blog. Fascinating stuff.”

               John would have coughed in that way of his when he didn’t quite know how to handle a situation but was going to weather it with a straight spine and a good-natured quirk of his eyebrows. “Ta,” he’d have replied, trading firm grips with the chemist.

               “It’s good to know how my former students are faring in the world,” Stefan would have added, letting his eyes fall back on Sherlock, “Particularly the ones I always took a special interest in.”

               Which would have been exactly the teacher’s brand of less-than-subtle, damn him. Sherlock would have lifted both eyebrows unconcerned and swept past them to Stefan’s desk.

               _Why would I have done that?_

_Because the threatening missive would have been left on Stefan’s desk, obviously._

The message would have been the most recent in a series, Stefan would not have called Sherlock for one threatening note. Probably would not have called him for less than ten sequential threatening notes.

Sherlock would have read it. It would have been all angry slashes of letters across the page, words rife with longing and the bitter sting of rejection. Perhaps from a boy Stefan had used once, and discarded the same way he used and discarded Sherlock’s classmates during their time together.

 _I’ll tell._ The letter swore, and Sherlock felt the thrill of conviction as the words emerged from the void of his memory. _You can’t make me disappear. You can’t just pretend like it wasn’t real. Like it didn’t happen. If you keep ignoring me, I’ll tell everyone what you did._

“I doubt that,” Sherlock would have scoffed as he set the letter – written on blue-lined notebook paper – back on the desk. If the boy who wrote it depended too deeply on Stefan. Sex, drugs… it didn’t matter. This boy believed himself in love with his professor and he wasn’t about to involve anyone else. But his growing desperation (indicated by the shaking hands that held the fountain-tip pen and the brutal stabs into the page that splattered ink across the paper) was a genuine threat.

“Your student is not going to call the police, if that’s your concern.” Sherlock would have said, with the appropriate pause for dramatic effect. He never could resist a touch of drama. His weakness was a good hook, always had been.

“Student?” John would have known when to prompt, purely for the sake of lighting the fuse which would have his lover blasting off into deductions. Sherlock could light up like the sun in the heat of a case, but it was John who said the right words to make it happen. If John had said police, Sherlock would have gone down a different trail of thought altogether. He’d have thought of late nights spent dodging Mycroft’s concern and mummy’s neurosis and taking comfort in warm arms and the sharp sting of a needle and a hot mouth that was always there when his defenses were down. He’d have jumped to conclusions about this unknown boy, and he’d have let his own damage cloud his judgment.

“Student. The paper is low grade note paper, the content suggests youth and desperation, the careful vagueness suggests shame and the pleading language suggests affection. Oh, Stef, you did a _number_ on this one.”

He wouldn’t have had to look at John to know that his eyebrows shot up his forehead as he took a second look at the handsome teacher. Not that John was likely to find him handsome in anything more than a purely aesthetic manner; he was hardly the doctor’s type. Too tall, too broad, too tanned and far too… Stefan. In fact, the foxlike way those forest green eyes calculated the depth of their commitment to one another, the almost-mocking upturn of his lips and the way he looked at Sherlock like a favorite old possession would have had John’s hackles raised in an instant.

He knew, absolutely _knew_ , how Stefan would have been looking at him. He knew it as surely as he knew that Stefan’s persistent use of his loathed birth name would have set John’s teeth to grind. And he knew it as surely as he knew that if he had looked at John that way even once, Sherlock would have thrown a fit.

Stefan would have denied all culpability, of course. And he would have been telling the truth. “Will,” he’d have sighed, “if I knew who this person was or what they were talking about, would I have contacted you?” After almost twenty years of silence between them? No, not likely. Stefan was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a man who showed weakness. Calling Sherlock in, had he had any ability to suss the culprit out for himself, would never have been an option.

“Well, you made someone angry, didn’t you?” John might have taken the letter, read it, and interjected in that way of his that makes everything seem straight forward, even when it was a convoluted mess.

 

Sherlock dragged his fingers through his hair, crossed the flat and picked up his violin. This might take a while.

***

               If John were honest, it had really started with that son of a bitch, Stefan James. Things had been as good as they’d ever been just before he decided to waltz back into Sherlock’s life. Not that they didn’t have their problems; Sherlock was like a toddler bound and determined to stick that fork in the light socket with his persistent nicotine dependence, his temper, one particularly stupid episode involving embalming fluid where John had come very close to punching him in his stupid, suicidal face and about a thousand other little irritants and compromises that make up any marriage.

               They’d fought before James. They’d screamed and slammed doors and gone to bed alone. They’d toppled furniture in their fights and toppled it again in their reconciliation. Sherlock was a miserable, jealous, possessive bastard to live with and it wasn’t fair that he made John feel guilty every time he so much as smiled at a beautiful woman.

               If John didn’t know him so well, he might have gotten fed up with his husband’s endless supply of bullshit. But Sherlock had said from the very first night that he truly believed that, one day, John was going to get tired of him and leave. Sherlock didn’t think he could be loved for everything he was. He thought he did not equal the sum of his parts and so he stuffed his heart in a box and refused to care. He didn’t think he could raise a child, didn’t think he could love it and his unspoken terror that John might eventually want kids more than he wanted Sherlock had broken John’s heart.

               Sherlock truly didn’t believe that John could love him as much as he loved John. Of course, he was wrong. He was paranoid and damaged and childish and so very, very wrong. Sherlock was the love of his life. There wasn’t a thing either of them could do about that, and John didn’t want to change it. Even in the face of his own pain, his divorce, his eventual remarriage to Mary and the children they might someday have, John couldn’t change that Sherlock was his soul mate. Sherlock might not believe in souls, and John didn’t know if he did either. But Sherlock was the other half of him and there was no getting around that.

               Not that it made any difference. They were over and as much as it tore him apart, he was determined to let Sherlock go. Sometimes, love isn’t enough. If it were, they would never have found themselves like this.

               Sherlock was damaged. And James had been a big damn piece of that puzzle. Stefan James had hurt Sherlock when he was still young enough to believe anyone who said they loved him.

               It had taken about two minutes for John to catch on that they used to date. Or whatever the creepy teacher-and-eighteen-year-old-genius-with-paternal-issues-and-an-overbearing-older-brother equivalent of dating is. James had taken advantage of Sherlock and it was obvious in the way Sherlock behaved around him.

               John steeped his mug of tea as he sat alone at the little kitchen table in his flat. If he breathed deep, he could smell Sherlock on his shirt. It hurt, but it calmed him. He wanted to hold on to that for just a little while before the time came when he would lose it forever.

 

               “Oh, Stef, you did a _number_ on this one.”

“I haven’t done anything to anyone, Will. In this case, I am completely innocent.” James had said as he pulled a face and stood far too close to the detective for John’s liking. Then again, after five minutes with him, the British Iles was too close for John’s liking. James was tall and handsome and cultured and exuded the same barely-conscious arrogance as Sherlock and Mycroft did. The two scientists looked like they were from different pages of the same men’s fashion catalogue and John felt very short and rumpled by comparison.

But there was something about James that had John on edge. Either of the Holmes men could be cold or even intimidating to anyone but John. But Stefan James seemed to thrum with quiet malice that flickered on and off like a mirage – there and gone so fast that John could not be entirely sure what he saw when he watched James look at Sherlock. There was heat and possession and desire, those were sickeningly obvious and James made no effort to hide them behind his neutrally pleasant smile. And in an instant, they were gone, too. Maybe John was just being a stupid, jealous sod. He wanted very badly to believe that.

Because the last time he’d seen someone look at Sherlock that way, John had been strapped in Semtex and watching a glowing red dot slide lovingly up Sherlock’s chest.

               “Well, you made someone angry, didn’t you?” John had asked after he stepped up beside his husband and plucked the note from between his long fingers, “can we get a list of people you might have annoyed?” John smiled that unassuming smile that disarmed strangers and made people who know him very nervous, “or maybe a file?”

               “Terribly sorry, _doctor_ , but I wouldn’t know where to begin?”

               Neither of the other men missed a beat when they said, in perfect tandem, “that many?”

               “Sorry to disappoint you, William, but I have no reason to think that any student in the entire school would have a single thing to tell about me.” He touched a single dark curl that had fallen across Sherlock’s forehead and John wanted to shoot him in the hand for it. He leaned in and while the detective might have stiffened at the intrusion, he stood his ground.  “I’ve learned to behave myself.”

               The doctor didn’t, truly didn’t want to know what the hell that meant. Truly. He might happily go about his life never finding out –

               “So, I take it you’ve stopped fucking your students, then?”

               Naturally. John may not have ever been anyone’s idea of a genius, but he was not a fucking idiot. And the idea that Sherlock had lied to him about being a virgin the first night they were together… why? Just why? It’s not as if John would have judged him. A guy with a nickname like Three Continents Watson had no room to pass judgment on anyone’s sex life. So why would Sherlock… Oh.

               Oh, for fuck’s bloody sake, Sherlock.

               John circled his fingers around Sherlock’s slender wrist, out of sight from their unwanted company. Well, John certainly wished he’d fall off a cliff at any rate. He swiped his thumb back and forth across the soft skin and knew his lover well enough to know that the detective was soothed by it, despite making absolutely no outward shift in composure.

               “You never slept with him.” John deduced, several minutes later as Sherlock poured over all the several notes that James had received and the teacher busied himself with some experiment on the other side of the lab. “That’s what this possessive machismo bullocks is about. The one who never let him have what he wanted.”

               “Sparkling, John. Truly. Good deduction, love.” Sherlock never looked up from the papers.

               “So, why the hell are we here?”

               “Pardon?”

               “You two had a thing. That’s obvious. Probably your first real relationship, if I were to guess. And he wanted to have sex but you weren’t ready. He pressured you and you broke it off. How am I doing so far?”

               “Very well,” And Sherlock sounded genuinely pleased by John’s observations.

               “But why would you take a case for an old boyfriend, who was a shit to you, whom you dumped almost twenty years ago when the case is barely a five and…” He stopped, sighed, felt that flash of realization that he could only imagine was a shadow of the euphoria Sherlock experienced when solving a puzzle, and said, “’this is my friend, John Watson’.”

               “Sorry?”

               “Blind Banker. Sebastian Wilkes. You brought me along to prove to some jerk in uni that you were capable of having friends. Some boy said something mean to you once and you just couldn’t resist the chance to prove him wrong.” John rolled his eyes, “For a man who loves mystery, you can be painfully obvious at times, love.”

               In lieu of an answer, Sherlock rifled through James’ desk for recent student papers. “What’s the betting that this handwriting doesn’t match any of these students?” he asked, gorgeous eyes finding John’s with a brightness that said _change the subject and change it now._

               “It’s never that simple, is it?” And John didn’t know if he was talking about handwriting or his taciturn husband.

               John was sitting at a desk with a pile of students’ tests on one side and one of the stalker’s notes on the other. He was looking for a similarity in any of the samples and so far the only thing that he could see was that college students had terrible handwriting.

And when a _doctor_ is saying that your penmanship is atrocious, that’s saying something.  

               A shadow fell across the desk and he didn’t need to look up to know it was not Sherlock’s. He tried not to let his tension show, as James leaned against his desk, tall and handsome and cocky and smug and John seriously wanted to kick his smarmy ass, but Sherlock might not appreciate that. James was apparently chewing on what he wanted to say to him, and John hoped for his sake that he was not about to try and share any intimate details of his relationship with Sherlock. They might never have had what the detective considered sex, but John knew that Sherlock didn’t consider anything but actual penetration to be sex. If James had been blowing Sherlock at this very desk, John never, ever wanted to know.

               He was fairly confident Sherlock had never sucked his teacher off. He might have once, as an experiment or because James pressured him into it, but after almost eleven years of marriage, John knew that Sherlock didn’t enjoy doing it. His gag reflex was too sensitive and it hurt him to go too deep. He’d once told John that he wanted to do it quite immensely, as he loved how it felt when John did it (and John – who had no problems whatsoever with a little sore throat – did it as often as he could get away with), but he just wasn’t built for blow jobs and they mostly balanced their sex life out with Sherlock letting John top most of the time.

               Of course, John realized he was thinking about sex with his husband while his husband’s evil ex studied him too closely for comfort but the point was that John was very happy with what he knew of Sherlock and sex and didn’t really want Stefan James expanding that picture into uncomfortable and barely legal territory. And since James was the only other boyfriend Sherlock ever had, and Sherlock had obviously been very badly hurt by this man, there was a more-than-small chance that anything James might have to say about “William” would be met with open hostility. And maybe violence. John was not above physical violence.

               Of course, James hadn’t quite gotten the unfriendly signals being aimed his way from a small but vicious army doctor and continued to stare until he finally spoke.

               “So, Will got married.” He said, “To you.” He was studying John as if the doctor were some kind of foreign species. _Improbable Maritus_.

Improbable Husband.

John knew enough Latin to get him by, he’d had to learn fast in medical school and while his scratchy and sloppy grasp of the language was nothing to Sherlock’s gorgeous, flowing linguistic genius, he got by on those special occasions when he wanted to make an effort for his lover. Who would have guessed Sherlock had a tongues kink? 

(John thought he might babble some Dari into Sherlock’s ear when he dragged his soldier to bed for a post-case shag that night. And he had. He’d spilled Latin and Dari and the pitiful German he knew in between every kiss and suck and lick that night. And all because of one odd random thought while James had stared him down.)

“Yeah,” He finally answered, “good deduction, that.” It was biting and sarcastic and exactly the sort of thing Sherlock might have said. Sherlock. Not William. Sherlock loved his chosen name, he’d discarded the other one as a child and Sherlock fit him to a T. It was odd and exotic and brilliant. Just like the man. It rolled off the tongue like something foreign and fascinating. Sherlock was no more William than he was Scott. He was Sherlock, and for this dickhead to come along and try to force Sherlock to be something he could not possibly be… John had to remember to be the mild-mannered and good-humored doctor, because every bit of him wanted to put the fear of Captain Watson into this prick.

“Why you?” James actually sounded genuinely curious. It was pure ego, true; he could not understand why a man like Sherlock Holmes would reject Stefan James and yet give himself entirely to a man like John Watson. John had a million answers on the tip of his tongue; I shot a man through the heart for him the third night we ever knew each other. I dress his wounds because he hates all other doctors. I make him tea and kiss his hair every single morning. I conduct his light when he’s shining too bright to see the answers. He has dinner with me even when he isn’t hungry – that’s important, ask The Woman. He’d be lost without his blogger. He threw himself off a roof to save me. He broke my heart once, and I forgave him. I tell him when he’s being brilliant and when he’s being not-good. I never call him beautiful because he hates to be told it. I refused to take money from his brother to spy on him. He married me because we laugh and we fight and we have amazing sex and we chase criminals and giggle at crime scenes and we love our land-lady and he plays his violin for me when I have nightmares.

All of those were very true reasons why they were married and why the marriage worked. The best proof of the rightness of making their relationship sexual was how absolutely nothing else changed. Sherlock had always hated the women he flirted with or dated. The more John liked them, the less Sherlock had.

But those details were intimate and treasured and John felt no inclination to share them with this smug bastard. So, instead he shrugged and smiled disarmingly, his eyes flashing to Sherlock who was paying too much attention to the papers before him to not be listening to every single word being said and hearing every single word John didn’t say. John said, “The heart wants” before he stood and walked to his husband.

“You forgot that you always remember to order extra lo mein and stuff it in the fridge because I love it cold but I’ll eat it all when it’s hot.” And how Sherlock knew so exactly which things had crossed John’s mind and which hadn’t, John would never really know. But he loved his miracle of a husband and he loved every reason – the innumerable reasons there were – that they were married.

They shared a heated look, one that promised multi-lingual orgasms as soon as this case was solved, before the detective was all business again. “I need you to get me more writing samples. His office is down the hall, his papers are in the basket on the left. Bring them all. I need a name to go with this penmanship.”

“Why doesn’t he go?” John asked, not at all comfortable with leaving Sherlock alone with this man.

Sherlock smiled like a shark, “Oh, no reason. It’ll just piss him off to have you rifling through his perfectly organized desk.” And he wouldn’t stop John because he wanted to be alone with Sherlock went unsaid. It did not go unheard.

John sighed. Sherlock was lucky John trusted him so implicitly. Because he trusted James not at all.

***

               Sherlock sawed out a truly agonizing note on his violin, the kind of note that would have made the neighbors think some poor animal were being very badly abused if the sound had come from anywhere but 221B.

               He would have been stupid and arrogant enough to think he could handle Stefan without John constantly at his side. That just the ring on his finger and the scent of old leather and aftershave on his skin would protect him from his old teacher.

               He abused his instrument some more as he imagined the door slamming closed behind John as the doctor went to fetch more evidence. Sherlock would have been looking for a student’s handwriting that nearly matched that of his threatening notes. Of course, there would have been evidence of the boy trying to mask his actual handwriting, of course there would be, but Stefan worked at a sizable university with an emphasis in applied chemistry. They were looking at over a thousand students and two thirds of them were male. Which made about seven hundred possible suspects. Sherlock would not only have been looking for similarities in the handwriting, he would have been narrowing his field. Things on this or that paper which told him about their writers. Ink smears from sweaty palms, signs of aggression in the way the pen bore down on the paper. Sherlock knew Stefan’s type and none of these boys – straight, nervous, dim-witted, violent – were what that professor liked. And Stefan was not likely to have changed his tastes.

               Stefan would have relished the opportunity to have Sherlock alone, and part of Sherlock would have wanted it just as much. Being near Stefan, feeling those hungry green eyes on him again after what felt like a lifetime, would have had the detective reeling like the besotted school boy he no longer was.

               “I don’t know whether to be furious or flattered,” Stefan would have purred words into Sherlock’s ear, that pleasantly neutral tone he used with John falling away to reveal his fury and amusement, “It’s as if you went out and found the one man least like me in the whole world on purpose just to bring him here.”

               “I’ve been married to John for more than a decade, Stefan. It’s not as if I pulled a man off the streets to parade as my lover. He actually is.” Sherlock would not have been able to concentrate on the words in front of him with Stefan breathing warm across his neck. He’d have felt… He _did_ feel cold unease and low-level addict’s need and that same slick hate that roiled in his belly at his old teacher’s curt dismissal of Sherlock’s only redeeming quality.

               “He’s your fan club, William,” Sherlock could see the down-turned slant of Stefan’s lips as he chided his former student, “I’ve read the blog, the poor man worships you.” He could almost feel those green eyes run hot over his tight, white button-down, “when did you stop liking a challenge?”

               Stefan would have been goading and Sherlock would have risen to the bait like an idiot school boy. He felt his cheeks heat with embarrassment at the absolute conviction of what must have happened next, “I still like a good challenge, Stef.” Of course Sherlock, idiot man, would have failed entirely to miss the implications of that statement until it was well and truly past his lips.

               As deductive reasoning – like hindsight – is twenty/twenty, Sherlock would not have realized at the time that Stefan was looking at him much as Sherlock looked at John whenever John made a medical observation about a body which Sherlock had overlooked, or when he pulled rank, or made a comment that led Sherlock to a brilliant deductive break through, or wore vests with no over shirt, or got sweaty doing manual labor in the summers, or… Sherlock almost dropped his violin as a wave of nerve-wracking _want_ shuddered through his entire body.

               No, he would not have noticed Stefan looking at him like that. Because he only noticed when John looked at him like that. When John looked at him with such naked, possessive and obsessive desire, Sherlock’s whole world shrank to nothing but that.

               He sawed another nails-on-chalkboard note on his violin, absent the finesse and talent with which he usually played and decided that if he continued on that train of thought, he was going to end up as a furious and sexually frustrated mess in the corner. It wasn’t so much the act he found himself missing but the closeness. He liked to have John warm and strong and pressed to every bit of him. It didn’t matter if their clothes were on or off, just a simple embrace was as intimate to Sherlock as the most carnal of sexual intimacies. Sherlock missed the touch, the reassurance of _yes, I’m here and I love you, too._

When Sherlock had been Stefan’s, he’d always been able to spot certain tells. And while he may not have paid any mind to how his old teacher was looking at him, he would not have overlooked the way that Stefan’s body angled towards him, alight with victory. “Does he challenge you, Will? Or does he follow obediently, like a – ”

               “Soldier?” Over the years, John picked up Sherlock’s fondness for a dramatic entrance and the tone of his voice would have been at about sub-zero temperatures. “Am I interrupting something?” And there would have been that dangerous cheer; that bouncing nonchalance that Stefan would not have recognized for what it was.

               “Yes – ”

               “ – No.”

               It would have been at about that moment Sherlock would have looked round and realized that he and his old teacher were intimately close, Stefan’s body angled towards him and Sherlock looking as if he were right at home with Stefan’s hip all but pressed against his side. But Sherlock never cared about personal space. Okay, he wasn’t exactly wrapped around Lestrade at any point, but it’s not like he’d ever been respectful of John’s personal boundaries… Oh, hell. No, John didn’t honestly think Sherlock…

               But he had. Sherlock could imagine it so clearly, it might as well have been the memory. The ice in John’s cobalt eyes, the dangerous calm in his hands and the military rigidity of his spine. John had been furious.

               “John,” Sherlock said as he stood calmly from Stefan’s chair and straightened the cuffs of his Belstaff, “forget the student papers, they aren’t going to be of any help to us.” He side-stepped Stefan and crossed the room, swishing past John and out the door.

               John would have followed, and he would not have done it quietly. “What the hell did I just walk in on?”

               “The papers aren’t going to help us.  Oh, you really are a lightning bolt. It’s not the stalker I need to focus on, it’s the stalked.”

               “Oh, you were focusing all right. If you’d been focusing any harder, he’d have been sitting in your lap!”

               “John, don’t be ridiculous. It’s not the boy’s interest in Stefan that’s the issue, its Stefan’s lack of interest in the boy. Stefan likes the ones who are smart and lonely. He’d need to look up to him without being completely subservient to him. Stefan would use a boy who showed interest, but he can stand to be bored even less than I can.”

               “So, we’re just not going to talk about the fact that he was about six inches away from sticking his tongue down my husband’s throat.” John’s jealousy would not have been tolerable. John might leave him one day, might decide he wanted a real family, might get tired of Sherlock’s erratic and intolerable behavior. Sherlock could accept that John might leave him for being too much himself, but he could not stand the idea of John, for even a second, thinking that Sherlock would ever want anyone or anything more than him.

               It would have taken two steps and a shove to have John against a wall, and then one slide of Sherlock’s hands up over the smaller man’s leather-clad shoulders and cupping his neck and sinking his lips to the soft down-turned frown of John’s. Sherlock would have said in any language the doctor wanted that Sherlock was not interested in rekindling his flame with Stefan.

               He could have told him, that being with Stefan had nearly cost Sherlock his life. Could have told him he was not interested in reigniting old habits, could have told him true and painful things that would have redirected John’s anger.

               But instead he said, “Did you know that in my first year here, I had to take a literature class?”

               “Uh… No. I didn’t know that.”

               “Well, I did. And it was dreadful, and I thought it was a waste of my time.”

               “So?”

               “When Stefan and I started, I thought I’d understood it better. I thought those flowery notions of love like wings and all that rubbish had merit.”

               “He made you feel poetic?” John was clearly not getting it, as evinced by the way his eyes shuttered. Like Sherlock was admitting that Stefan was his one great and Shakespearian love. Wrong.

               “No,” Sherlock said, meaningfully, “He made me feel like poetry. Like the lines that didn’t fit his meters or the words that didn’t fit his rhymes could be cut away and scrapped. Like he could take a pencil and scratch out the words that aren’t pretty; like he could rearrange what was left into something that sounded profound and pretend it wasn’t meaningless.”

               “Sherlock…”

               “You make me feel like science, John. Every piece is necessary to the integrity of the whole. And even if the sum of every part does not equal beauty or perfection, it’s still a valuable scientific equation.” He kissed John’s hair, “do you understand?”

               John, whose hands had found their way into the folds of Sherlock’s coat, hugged his detective closer and rested his forehead on Sherlock’s collarbone, “I understand, love. I’m sorry, I just really… there’s something about that guy that…”

               “You don’t trust him.” Sherlock observed, “That’s smart.”

               “He looks at you like he wants to chain you up in his basement. No, I don’t trust him.  Want to use him to test the durability of Mrs. Hudson’s new bins.”

               “I’m a bad influence on you, John Watson.”

               “And you’d better fucking stay that way, Sherlock Holmes.”

 

               Over the past several days, missing John had become his full-time occupation. He looked over at the clock in the kitchen and couldn’t believe he’d been in the hospital and completely ignorant only that morning. It was nearing up on midnight and Sherlock felt frayed and tired and lonely to the very core of his being. He hadn’t slept well in the hospital since after that first night five weeks ago when John had been holding his hand. He’d assumed it was because hospital beds are dreadful, but now faced with the very real prospect of either their bed or the couch, loneliness settled in the detective’s core. He decided instead to climb the twenty steps to John’s old room and breathe in what little he could of his husband while curled up in his old blankets amidst the boxes that had just sort of invaded the space once John moved everything of his to Sherlock’s larger bedroom.

               The pillow smelled like dust for the most part, but the faint traces of John’s _real_ shampoo (not the rot she had him using instead) and it made the creaking springs worth it. He almost wanted to cry, he felt as if he were entitled to one good nerve-wracking, heart-wrenching sob of self pity. But no – if he’d let John go. If he’d been stupid or insane enough to drive away the only real happiness he’d ever found, he was not going to cry.

He was going to fix it. He rolled over on to his back, staring up at the darkness around him, and Sherlock Holmes devised a plan.


	12. Chapter Eleven

Their marriage had been happy. Not perfect, not at all, but happy. In a sea of soft words and praise and laughter, John had just let all the little bits bleed together until they were less individual memories and more a general understanding that he had been _happy_.

               When Sherlock had told him that being loved by John was like being science – necessary for every imperfect part – he remembered feeling both stupid and relieved. He’d been foolish for letting his jealousy and insecurity get the best of him.

 

               “So,” he’d asked after a prolonged moment of just breathing his detective in and enjoying the warmth of him in the drafty university hall, “if we’re not looking for matching handwriting, and Gilderoy Lockheart in there swears up and down that he is an innocent doe – which I don’t believe for a second – how are we going to find his stalker?” He considered for a moment and then added, “Also, why are we helping a man who clearly has a bit of his own coming?”

               “We’re not helping him, John.” Sherlock had said with a rare quiet intensity, “we’re helping some stupid boy who didn’t know any better. Which is why it’s senseless to spend our time sifting through hundreds of samples of handwriting. It’s not about the boy’s feelings toward Stefan – my former professor has a taste and a predilection. It will be far easier and more expedient to simply access his rosters and root out our young man by process of elimination.”

               “Brilliant, but how are we going to do that, there are hundreds of kids in his lectures, and all of them can’t possibly be here today.” John kept pace with Sherlock as the detective strode down the halls, Belstaff billowing dramatically behind him.

               “Undoubtedly,” Sherlock replied, “But since we already have a general understanding of what occurred between Stefan and this student, we have already narrowed the suspect pool considerably.”

               “So, what do we look for?”

“We’re looking for a boy of about nineteen. A freshman. Stefan does not actively pursue freshmen, but if he shows an interest in them, he will lay the foundation for a deeper flirtation later on. Or, at least he used to. He’s still handsome and still fit so I doubt he’d have much trouble pulling, even though he isn’t twenty-seven anymore.  This boy would have to be interesting enough for Stefan to notice but not interesting enough for Stefan to pursue. Stefan rejected this boy, but not before he interacted with him.”

“And not before he did something that makes this kid think he’s got blackmail material.”

“Exactly, yes.” Sherlock agreed.

“So, how do we find this boy?”

“Simple, John.” Sherlock had led the way out of the building and the doctor had found himself swept up in the inexorable tide of his husband’s enthusiasm, “we simply find the boy who is most likely to have caught Stefan’s eye buy not kept it. And for that, we need to break into the student files and cross-reference every freshman Chemistry student with what I already know of my old professor. Shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“And how are we going to gain access to these files? It’s not like we can just shove everyone out of the registrar’s office for an hour while we conduct our _entirely illegal_ investigation.”

Sherlock had led them around three buildings and into a fourth where the halls buzzed with laughter and chatter from students as they made their way between classes or took meals together in the Bistro. John remembered catching the scent of fried food and decided he was going to drag Sherlock in for a real meal once this was over. The detective hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning.

John had attended St. Bartholomew’s and while it was an excellent school – in his unwavering opinion, and obviously in Sherlock’s if the detective’s  frequent badgering of the Medical Examiner were to be believed – Sherlock’s Alma Mater was… God. John had maintained high marks all through school, desperate to be a surgeon but from a family far too poor to pay for his continued education, and his interest had always been firmly in “meatball” surgery. Perhaps it was too many viewings of M*A*S*H as a boy (or maybe it was his ill-concealed crush on Alan Alda) but John wanted nothing more than to be a high-risks, high-stress surgeon tasked to perform complicated operations under risky conditions. And he’d loved it. He missed it with all his heart.

But if he’d ever wanted to go in for a softer occupation, Sherlock’s university would have been the school to go to.  It wasn’t the kind of place that would produce a Hawkeye Pierce, but it was the sort of place that would foster the abilities of a Gregory House.  John had been quite impressed.

The registrar’s office was the only place they could get the needed information and their files were on an individual server from the rest of the school. John’s hopes hadn’t been high for an empty office, but that didn’t make the receptionist a more welcomed sight.

“So, what do we do now?” John asked as they peered through the double doors. The receptionist was a very attractive woman with dark red hair and pale blue eyes behind thick-framed glasses. She would have been exactly the kind of woman John went for, once. And that gave John a very bad idea.

He’d grabbed his detective by one pale and bony wrist and dragged him round the corner and out of sight. He pulled the taller man in by the lapels of his ridiculous coat and kissed him deep and slow. He let his tongue dip into and caress Sherlock’s mouth as his fingers slid up to cup his neck and tangle in his dark curls. It was the kind of kiss that drove back the ice that was always just around the edges of Sherlock’s behavior. The kind of kiss usually reserved for those times when the ice threatened to take him over and tear apart his brilliant mind.

He’d torn his lips from his dazed husband’s, fighting down that spike of desire that never failed to shoot right down his spine when he looked into those fever-bright, brilliant eyes after a proper snog, and smoothed a black curl back from that angular face.

“You’ll know the all-clear when you see it, yeah?” and with that, he’d turned on his heel and marched into the office to flirt with the receptionist. It felt like playing with fire, but it wasn’t like Sherlock could do it, the man was sex on two legs with his eyes and cheekbones and that little mole on his neck, but he was capable of maintaining the Charming Sherlock façade for – last John had clocked it – seven minutes and thirty-two seconds. He was only capable of maintaining Heterosexual Sherlock for thirty-eight minutes, and No I Don’t Keep Severed Heads in the Fridge Sherlock for a whopping four minutes and eleven seconds.  All of those fake identities together would last about eight minutes and then he’d have had the poor woman in tears or punching him in the face.

And John could barely type a blog, how the hell was he supposed to crack a school database? No, best John distracted the receptionist while Sherlock worked the computers and face whatever jealous crap his husband threw his way afterward. It would make them about even for the day.

It took John maybe two minutes, once he was inside, of smiling and chatting to get her to agree to go across the hall with him for coffees and he glanced at Sherlock as he led her out the door. Sherlock didn’t seem to know whether to be furious or impressed; John was still fit and still exuded charm and still had a great smile and more blonde hair than gray, but John was also forty three and not the sort of bloke that any mid-twenties girl should look twice at. But with a few words and a disarming grin, he had led her like the pied piper from her obligations.  

 Caroline had been a very nice girl; smart and charming and truly lovely. She laughed at John’s stories of medical mayhem and shared with him anecdotes of filing errors and student pranks. John felt bad for deceiving her, but she was not nearly the first woman he’d done it to nor the last woman he’d feel guilty for doing it to. But for forty minutes he bought her coffee and bagels and kept her so immersed in their conversation that she never once looked at her watch.

John had forgotten how nice it felt just to sit around and chat with a lovely woman whom he had no intentions of bedding. Sherlock rarely gave him the opportunity to make new friends, which would probably sound horrible if he said it out loud, but the truth was that the detective was just sort of the hub of John’s life. When he was with Sherlock, he didn’t want to be with anyone else. When he was with other people, he found himself wondering what Sherlock was doing and counting the moments until he texted.

He always texted.

He still went out with Greg and Mike, he still occasionally went out with his old rugby friends, and the rare army buddy had wandered through John’s life in the years he’d been back (and boy hadn’t it been awkward to introduce his RAMC fuck buddy to his frighteningly perceptive husband), but at the beginning and end of the day, it was just the two of them. New people didn’t usually enter into their sphere unless they were a client or a suspect.

It was three quarters of an hour before Sherlock appeared at his shoulder, looking down at his face and neck and hands as if checking for a change of heart. As if forty-five minutes with a woman would make John realize his mistake in tethering himself to a mad male genius. John, as usual, took it in his stride, smiling with just a bit of wonder. How could he help it? He didn’t really expect anyone else to understand the way – the sheer force – of how Sherlock loved him. 

Sherlock might never believe that he was all John wanted, but that only meant that John could spend the rest of their lives proving it.

And then Sherlock opened his mouth.

“Repeat after me, John; daddy issues.”

John sighed, “Sherlock, don’t even start.” He made to stand but Sherlock, either because he truly didn’t know what an asshole he was or because he truly didn’t care, was going to have his say.

“It’s one part narcissism and one part deep-rooted psychological issues. Her attraction is based partially on the fact that you bare a fleeting resemblance to her absentee father and, by that same coincidence, you bare a fleeting resemblance to her. Also, there is absolutely no way that in forty-five minutes she failed to see your wedding ring and she takes perverse delight in what she assumes is her indefinable magnetism which entices men to cheat on their wives with her.”

He ignored John’s glare and Caroline’s red-faced embarrassment (and ill-concealed hurt) and straightened the cuffs of his coat, “coming, John?”

               John and Sherlock existed on a precarious balance. They loved each other, they were devoted to each other, but moments like that made John feel like one wrong move, one wrong word, would send their whole life collapsing in on itself. Sherlock never seemed to notice his cruelty, or that other people could be hurt by the things he said. John had gotten used to it over the years. That didn’t mean he accepted it.

               “Ignore him, Carol. He’s just mad because his old boyfriend’s in town and he doesn’t know how to deal with it and he’s transferring his own insecurities. And daddy issues.” 

               Sherlock made low growl and John ignored him, taking out a pen and writing his number on a napkin, “If you’re ever around Baker Street, I know a great sandwich shop.” He smiled his most alluring, most charming smile at her before taking her hand and – he could practically hear his husband’s _don’t you dare_ – chastely kissed her soft knuckles. “It’s been lovely to meet you.”

               “Is he your… are you two…?” Caroline didn’t seem to quite know how to approach the obvious. She looked from the napkin with John’s number to his cobalt blue eyes, to the door through which Sherlock had just stormed.

               “He is and we are.” John shrugged, “I’m sorry again for his behavior, it was nice to meet you.” He offered the woman – who actually looked absolutely nothing like him – a parting smile and followed the great big berk that was his husband out the door.

               “That was a cheap shot.” Sherlock growled next to his ear, materializing out of seemingly nowhere and wrapping vice-like fingers around John’s bicep.

               “You were being a dickhead. And after what I walked in on earlier, you have no damn right to be jealous. And no reason, come to think of it. You knew I wasn’t going to do anything with the girl, I’m nearly old enough to be her father! Also, in case you forgot while you were getting sniffed at by your ex, I’m married.”

               “You gave her your phone number!”

               “I wouldn’t have, if you’d not been such a shit!”

               Sherlock growled low in his chest, “So you gave a woman your number just to make me crazy.”

               “I’m not going to fuck her, Sherlock.” He sighed, rolling his eyes. Sherlock was the dumbest genius he’d ever met, really. “I put up with your obsessive jealousy and possessive mania every single day. And then I’m gone for twenty fucking seconds and you’re all but drooling on your evil ex!”

               “I told you –“

               “I know, Sherlock!” John shouted, and then softer, “I know. Sherlock, I know you love me. I know you don’t love him. I know you hate the idea that I would be jealous. I know he hurt you and I know you have no plans to go back to him. But Sherlock, You didn’t see your face.” He put a hand to Sherlock’s perfect cheek, “There was something. There’s still something. And I am fairly certain I have never given you as much reason to doubt my intentions with any woman as you gave me with the way you looked at him.”

               “John, I – ”

               “I know.”

               Sherlock looked lost as a child. He looked miserable and hurt and John wanted to fold him into his arms and take that hurt away. He wanted to take his mad man away from that school and all its memories and especially its occupants.

               “I found three suspects,” Sherlock said, as he pulled himself away from John reluctantly.

               “Okay, who would you like to start with?” John asked, letting Sherlock go and shoving his hands in his pockets. In the years they had been together, John had become an expert in emphasizing the parts of himself that Sherlock needed at that moment and tampering down on the rest. He thought of it – in his own tongue-in-cheek sort of way – as optimizing.

               Away went John the Lover, John the Caretaker, John the Friend (though never very far) and out came John the Investigator, John the Blogger, John the Potential Marksman and John the Doctor.

               “No need to differentiate,” Sherlock said dismissively, “They are all in the same class. Right now, as a matter of fact. We simply go back to Stefan’s lab and observe until I deduce the culprit.”

               “Oh, good!” John said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable, “More time with professor pedophile.”

               John knew in an instant that it was the absolute wrong thing to say. Sherlock bristled from head to toe, his eyes going flinty and cold.

               “I was not a fucking child, John.” He hissed, “I was perfectly capable of making my own choices and I don’t need to justify those choices to you or to Mycroft or to my mother or anyone. Drop the bloody subject.” He took a shaking breath and swept past the doctor in a swirl of fury and wool, marching down the hall with no concern as to whether John were following him or not.

 

***

               Sherlock could feel cold shame and white hot outraged better than he could actually remember the reason for them. Something, he deduced as he reclined on the groove-worn couch, something had truly devastated him.

               Faintly, as if an echo of an echo, he could recall the phrase “professor pedophile” in the sneering sarcastic tones John reserved for those he truly loathed. Sherlock felt instant shame, counting himself chief among the drooling fools who would sit in wonder of his old teacher back when he had been a student.

               John had wounded him with those words.

              

               They must have gone back to Stefan’s class. Sherlock would have had suspects and would have wanted to test the seven or so theories roving around in his mind. The blog entry had said it was a student. John had gone into an uncharacteristic lack of detail describing how the events of the case unfolded and Sherlock found himself frustrated, for one of the very few times he could recall or imagine, he wished John had been more flowery in his recounting of the day’s events.

               Sherlock relinquished his violin to Mrs. Hudson only when she came upstairs and threatened to make him watch some home decorating show with her if he didn’t stop torturing the poor thing.

               John usually loved recounting Sherlock’s brilliance; immortalizing it on his blog. John never said, but Sherlock suspected it was his way of making the world see the detective through John’s eyes. He was constantly accused of being Sherlock’s fanboy, his assistant, his minion or some unflattering combination thereof, but John - in truth – was the only person who ever told Sherlock when he was being a dickhead. There was nothing star-struck about the way John handled him.

 

               Going back to Stefan’s class would have been a tense affair. John, not ever one to cater to Sherlock’s tantrums, would have been equally annoyed as he was concerned. Sherlock didn’t usually care about the emotions involved when making deductions, but it was harder to ignore his own feelings.

               Once again, John and Sherlock would have found themselves outside the pale wooden doors of Stefan’s classroom.

               Sherlock would have been looking through the circular windows, observing the minute behavioral tells of the students whom the detective suspected.                Clenching fists, the subtle slide of the gaze as it took in the professor, slowing down or speeding up of the pen which glided over paper to record every word that fell from Stefan’s mouth.

               Sherlock didn’t need to see it to know the slick disgust that settled in his stomach as he watched young men who were mirrors of himself at eighteen. None of them showed anything like malice. Just admiration, attraction, or both.

               Sherlock would not have been paying attention to anything John was saying or doing. So he might not have noticed when John did something brilliant.

               Because, Sherlock realized as he twisted back and forth in front of his unlit fireplace at 221B, John never gave so little detail about a case on his blog. Not when Sherlock solved it and not when Sherlock didn’t solve it.

               John only brushed over so many details on those rare, gorgeous occasions when John solved it.

 

***

               John didn’t realize how affected Sherlock was by his old university until the doctor had accidentally hurt his feelings. Sherlock thought John was accusing him of being complacent in Stefan’s abuse of him, thought he was calling Sherlock a defenseless child.

               John wanted to take it back, but the fact was it was true.

               Sherlock had been a socially awkward boy, too smart for his own good and too sheltered for anyone else’s. James had taken advantage of that and he’d done it when Sherlock was not emotionally mature enough to really understand what he was getting himself into. Just because Sherlock had been eighteen did not make James’ actions any less abhorrent. It was a legal technicality, and practically no different than if Sherlock had been sixteen.

               And that was what John found himself looking for as students filed out of James’ classroom after the lesson. Sherlock was looking at the facts, and that’s what he was good at. GPAs and professor comments on their student records and socio-scientific tells in their body language and expression. John was looking for the same look in a teenage boy’s eyes as his own husband had had just moments before.

               Lost and weak and angry. Hurt. Wounded by his unwitting affection for the handsome poison that Stefan James embodied.

               The boy who owned that expression was a boy slightly shorter than Sherlock with a shock of black hair and porcelain-pale skin. His eyes were turquoise and distant; staring a thousand miles off as he shuffled down the hall, his head held up even as his jaw clenched and unclenched with impotent anger.

               “Sherlock,” John muttered, “Him.” He nudged his husband and nodded toward the boy who looked more and more like the detective the more John looked at him. He was met with silence at his side. Sherlock was either not paying attention or staunchly ignoring him, and John often could not tell the difference.

               _Fine_ , John thought, and then followed the boy. He didn’t bother to check if Sherlock was coming.

               He followed the boy to the library so casually that the boy didn’t notice. He stayed a book stack behind him, perusing books half-heartedly with one eye on the back of his head.

               “Fuck,” the boy muttered, “fuck.”

               John heard the unmistakable sound of a sniffle and the shuffle of a sleeve being wiped viciously over wet cheeks. His heart broke a little for the kid.

               John stepped around the bookshelf and the boy’s head shot up, his eyes gone wide.

               “Relax,” John said, tucking away his soldier and marksman selves and calling upon his friend and doctor selves. He became absolutely no threat to the boy. Just a short older man in an unfortunate jumper who had the kind of warm openness that one can’t help but trust.

               “Are you alright?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets, casual and relaxed and still no threat to this startled young man.

               “I’m fine,” he growled, “go away.”  The boy was hunched at his shoulders, skittish as a feral cat and he reminded John so much of Sherlock that the doctor wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to help himself kneecapping Stefan James the next time they crossed paths.

               “You don’t seem fine,” John observed conversationally, “Maybe I can help.”

               The boy laughed, a hollow and bitter sound, “Nobody can help me. I… Look, just leave me alone. I. You should leave me alone.”

               “I’m a doctor,” John offered, “I might be able to help.”

               “I don’t need a doctor,” the boy hissed, “I need a coroner. My life is. My life is fucking _over._ ”

               John stuffed his hands in the pockets if his brown bomber jacket and leaned against the stone wall beside the window which looked out across a green field to another formidable stone school building, “Well, if you’re already dead, it can’t hurt to talk, can it?”  

               The boy looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, “What do you care?”

               John had several things he wanted to say to that (“because no kid deserves to wear that kind of expression,” “because you look like someone I love and I can’t bear to see him suffer,” “because it’s not your fault,” “because someone should have told you that you deserve better.”) but all he could manage was, “because I do.”

               I know who you are,” the boy said, “You’re John Watson. You’re here with _him_.”

               “Yes,” John said, deciding that honesty was the best idea at this point, “And I think you know why.”

               “I haven’t done anything!” the boy said, taking a step back.

               “Criminal threatening and stalking are things, son.” John did not close the gap between them, “don’t run. It won’t do any good. Just tell me what happened and I can help you.”

               “Sure you can,” the boy snarled, “That’s why you’re here, working for Stefan. Because you’re on _my_ side.” Sarcasm dripped venomously from every word.

               “Stefan James is a tit. He hurt someone I love once and if he’s done the same to you, he deserves to answer for that.”

               “He hasn’t done anything to me.” The boy said, “He didn’t want me. He made me believe he did, and then he offered to work with me privately. He met with me and he made me believe he wanted me but he didn’t. He wanted me because I reminded him of someone else. When I couldn’t be them, he not only tossed me aside but he tossed me out of his class, too. He said I wasn’t cut out for advanced chemistry and destroyed my GPA.”

               “So, he never slept with you?” John asked, surprised.

               The boy’s eyes leaked as he muttered, “Stefan never so much as touched me. That’s how worthless I am to him.”

               “So you decided to start sending threatening letters, demanding he make things right, and threatening to tell someone what he’d done,”  Sherlock materialized behind the boy, who whipped around to look at him. “Except that you knew you didn’t have any solid proof. More than that…” Sherlock sighed, “more than that, you didn’t want to ruin his career. You didn’t want to take your claims to the president of the university. You wanted Professor James to amend what he’d done to your academic standing, but he refused and you – _stupidly_ thinking you could reason with him – began first to plead, and then demand, until you finally started to threaten vague retaliations. And here we are.”

               “I just wanted him to fix what he did to my grades. He almost got me kicked out of school!”

               “I’m sure that was his goal,” Sherlock said, “The fact that you are still here means you’ve already beaten him.” He took a step toward the boy, towering over him the way he managed to tower over everyone, no matter whether they were taller, “Take my considerable advice, Alex; let him go. He will destroy you if you allow it. Finish your schooling and put Stefan James behind you. If you continue these threats and this behavior, you will get caught and you will lose everything.” He placed a hand on Alex’s shoulder, “he is not worth it.”

               “How do you know my name?” Alex asked, sniffling back the tears that Sherlock coaxed from him with the kind of gentle comradery that surprised even John.

               “It’s on your bag,” Sherlock dismissed, “and no, we aren’t going to turn you over to the school. We are going to trust that you won’t do it again. That you will put this behind you and give your attention to the boy who sits behind you in your remedial chemistry class, because he is quite taken with you.”

               He let slip the smallest and rarest of genuine smiles before he leaned over to john and muttered, “the boy is… distressed, or whatever, help him back to his room. Make him tea. I don’t know, do that people-thing you do.” He pressed his lips briefly to John’s temple before stalking back out from between the shelves in a flutter of dark wool and brooding curls.

 

***

               “You bastard,” was the first thing Sherlock said as he stomped into Stefan’s office, “you utter son of a bitch.”

               “Is there context to this outburst, Will?”

               “Do not play stupid with me, Stefan, you deliberately went after that boy just so that you could call me in here when he snapped.”

               “I have no idea what you’re talking about, William,” Stefan met his eyes with heated intent, “I told you I didn’t do anything. I haven’t touched a single student, no matter how willing they are.”

               “No,” Sherlock snarled, leaning over Stefan’s desk, “you just rig the situation so that they destroy themselves.”

               “I take it you solved my case?” Stefan remained conversational, “give me his name so that I can report him to the university board.”

               “I solved your case – if you can credit this side-show as a case -  and it ends right here. You do not go after him. You do not pursue this, and you do not _ever_ contact John and me again.”

               Stefan rose from his chair and mirrored Sherlock’s stance – bent at the waist, hands flat on his desk, “I won’t go after the boy, he’s not important to me. But I’ll see you again, Will. Because you have always belonged with me. I let you dither with your little blonde groupie because he’s no threat to me. You didn’t come here for a case, you came here for me. You still want me. You still love me. And you still belong to me.” He smirked, “Addict.”

               Sherlock opened and closed his mouth, lost for retort when Stefan’s hand shot up, dug into his hair and pulled his face forward for a bruising kiss that felt like the silver prick of a needle and the white hot ecstasy of seven percent.

              

               Back in 221B Sherlock felt slippery nausea as he considered what he might have allowed Stefan to do. What he had allowed Stefan to do when he was young. But no. Sherlock was not that kid anymore. Sherlock was not helpless, He was not an addict, he was not William. He was –

 

               _John. JohnJohnJohn… not an addict notanaddictnotanaddict. No. No._ Sherlock pushed Stefan away, shoved and stumbled a step back and knocked over a book stack by the office door and wiping fitfully at his mouth.  “I am not a child anymore, Stefan. You are nothing to me but a bad memory.”

               He peered out the door as John wandered into the lab adjacent and he turned back to his old professor, “If you ever think to go after John, I will destroy you. Even if I have to destroy myself along with you.”

               Stefan smirked, alight with challenge, “I’ll see you soon, Will.”

 

               Sherlock steered John out of the lab before he could take more than two steps into it. “We’re going home,” the detective snarled.

               “Sherlock, wait.” John wrestled him to a standstill, “I’m sorry about what I said before. It was wrong of me.”

               “No, it wasn’t.” Sherlock snapped, “I was a stupid child for ever letting myself get dragged into… that. I was foolish and gullible. I was – ”

               “You were doing exactly what all the rest of us were doing.” John said, “You were falling in love and figuring yourself out.” He brushed a stray curl from Sherlock’s forehead, “I just wish it hadn’t caused you so much pain.”

               For a second, Sherlock wanted to tell John what had just happened. _He kissed me_ , Sherlock wanted to confess, _he kissed me and I pushed him away because it felt like hatred and morphine. When he had me, he kept me so numb that I didn’t feel anything but what he told me to feel and I never want to feel that way again._

               “You were brilliant today,” Sherlock said, “truly brilliant.”

               “Not bad at all, was I?” John unleashed that sunlight smile that warmed the detective from the inside out. He wanted to go back to Baker Street and make love until the whole day was wiped from his hard drive.

***

               John stared into his empty tea cup and tried not to remember how wrong everything felt that night. How the sex felt like forgetting and the kisses felt like guilt. How Sherlock seemed distant and angry and John tried so hard not to wonder what old feelings Sherlock’s old teacher had dug up in the detective.

               Sherlock claimed to have no good feelings for the man, but he’d loved James once. And there was still some secret thing between them that John was not allowed to be privy to. It had stung and it had festered like a wound, infecting their happiness from the moment it appeared.

               Until it destroyed them. 


End file.
